By Phil Hall George Lakoff was one of the people involved in the Generative Semantics project. They believed there was a deep structure to meaning. But it failed. It failed because meaning is fuzzy and tautological and hardly something that can be explained in branching tree diagrammes. But subsequently the generative semanticists, and especially Lakoff, learned from their mistakes. This lead them to a new way of explaining meaning through embodied experience as metaphor. This was their deep structure. In doing so they began to disagree with ideas of thought that were about cognition as a kind of optimised information processing. Noam Chomsky, a deeply rational and lucid man, made certain assumptions based on tried and tested principles from the philosophy of science. Lakoff and others called this an objectification of something that was actually deeply subjective and experiential; namely the interplay between experience and language. This was some time ago. Their positions haven’t changed much for 30 years.
