George Lakoff in a nutshell is a linguist.
He was in direct competition with Chomsky in the early 1960s.
Because Chomsky's conceptualizations of linguistics meshed VERY
well with the growing early stages of computing, Chomsky won.
Lakoff continued with his theories and found new footing in the
late 1970s basing our understanding of things on Metaphors
rather than Chomsky's Language Generator. [I might have the name
of it wrong].
Flash forward a little later, and he expanded it into the
concept of Embodied Cognition.
Now, like Chomsky, he works heavily in political work; Lakoff
advising current democrats on the proper ways to write speeches
and Chomsky taking more an an activist role in politics but both
have similar political leanings.
While Chomsky is still king in Linguistics (he's the only thing
in what's considered linguistics now - or at least, very
nearly); Lakoff has been gaining some footing with his metaphor
and embodied cognition concepts via cognitive science; brain
scans have shown how the metaphors we use show up as literal in
the brain, proving tentatively some of his ideas.
[which also proved some of Heidegger's ideas, such as the hammer
being an extension of the body; in the brain, indeed it is].
