George Lakoff and the Rhetoric of Scientificity

I recently had a discussion with someone who is a tremendous fan of the work of George Lakoff, and who went on and on about how Lakoff's work is revolutionary, and how finally we have a paradigm that allows us to escape from the Cartesian paradigm. I found this discussion extremely irritating. I've read a few of Lakoff's books (Metaphors to Live By, Philosophy in the Flesh, and Moral Politics), and found that the first two books read like the worst type of Freudian symbolism (you know the type, that symbolism that traces every element of a dream back to the body such that the umbrella must be a penis and a doorway or fireplace must be a vagina), while the third book read like an extremely crude and vulgar form of cultural studies. On the one hand, I'm irritated by the idea that these ideas are somehow new. Rhetoricians have claimed, for thousands of years, that pathos is central to effective persuasion. We really needed cognitive scientists to reveal the importance of affect, metaphor, and myth? But there's also nothing new in the idea of embodied thought: These claims were already advanced by Hobbes, Hume, Nietzsche, Freud (perhaps even Hegel), Heidegger, Dewey, and Merleau-Ponty.

But what irritates me most of all is how the signifiers "science" and "cognitive science" are used by Lakoff. Here I think we're dealing with an enthymeme. First of all, I don't think we find anything particularly scientific in Lakoff's interpretations (incidentally, Lakoff takes himself to be undermining the tradition of literalism, yet ironically doesn't seem to notice that he treats the lived body as the literal sense or meaning of metaphorical expressions). However, Lakoff wants to argue that his interpretations do not have the status of interpretations, but are founded in cognitive science and neurology. In evoking these signifiers Lakoff wishes to set up a friend/enemy, us/them, binary organized around science/non-science. Consequently, if someone disagrees with Lakoff's cultural interpretations, that person is non-scientific (i.e., an advocate of false beliefs) and must therefore a) reject the thesis that mind is inseparable from body, and b) must therefore be a Cartesian rationalist. Poppycock!

Perhaps this is also why I find reading figures like Althusser so irritating. I'm generally suspicious of those who make ethical, political, and cultural claims based on what they call science. Gould presents an excellent analysis of where this can lead in The Mismeasure of Man.

Has anyone else experienced similar or related frustration with the work of Lakoff?