Lakoff paper on "Metaphor and War" available

[Dave.Touretzky@DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU]

Some of you, partiicularly those who attend Cognitive Science or
participated in the 1988 or 1990 connectionist summer schools, have met
George Lakoff, a linguist at Berkeley who is interested in connectionist
matters.  His work on phonology provided the inspiration for my own
research efforts in this area, and his book "Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things" is must reading for people in cognitive science.  (When I first
heard of it I thought the book was about feminism, but the title actually
comes from a true anecdote about a primitive people whose mythology leads
them to put the words for women, fire, and dangerous things in the same
linguistic class.  The sun is female, you see.)

Anyway, George works on many interesting problems related to language,
including the role of metaphor in our ability to understand and talk about
abstract concepts.  He has written a paper about the metaphors that
underlie our understanding of the current conflict in the Persian Gulf.
People who are interested in cognitive science might want to take a look at
it.  He is particularly eager for people to have a chance to read it before
January 15.

The paper is too long to post here, and in any case it's too divorced from
connectionism to be appropriate for this list, but you can retrieve it from
the neuroprose directory at Ohio State.  Retrieval instructions appear at
the end of this message.  A copy has also been posted to comp.ai.  Or you
can receive a copy by sending email to George at lakoff at cogsci.berkeley.edu.

Only the first half of the paper deals with metaphor.  The second half is
political analysis.  It will no doubt be controversial.  But I'm warning
all readers right now: I will not permit discussions of Persian Gulf
politics on this mailing list.  Read the paper at your own risk; send mail
to George if you like; start a discussion on talk.politics.misc or
alt.desert-shield or whatever newsgroup you feel is appropriate, but keep
it *off* the CONNECTIONISTS mailing list!  I will do unspeakably nasty
things to anyone who violates this rule.  The only reason I'm permitting
the paper to be announced here at all is because of its cognitive science
content.

-- Dave Touretzky

================ How to retrieve the paper from Neuroprose ================

1.  Open an FTP connection to 128.146.8.62 (cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu)
2.  Login as user "anonymous", password "neuron"
3.  cd /pub/neuroprose
4.  type binary
5.  get lakoff.war.ps.Z
6.  bye
7.  uncompress lakoff.war.ps.Z
8.  Then send the file lakoff.war.ps to your local PostScript printer.