I’m finding George Lakoff and cohorts unique (but maybe that’s my lack of looking enough) in that they seem among the first posit a direct, naturalized account of logic and mathematics, as extended metaphors on basic concepts we learn at young ages.

Quine didn’t hold his, while a naturalist he held logic and math don’t directly answer to the world most of the time:

How is Quine to explain the apparent necessity and a priori status of some truths without appeal to the Principle of Tolerance? Quine’s holism is the view that almost none of our knowledge is directly answerable to experience.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/#QuinNatuImpl

Logical positivists wouldn’t have either as math and logic are analytic and a priori, not empirical.

Not Kant either.

Seems like these kind of questions were ignored for a while(?), then back to Aristotle and Plato.

The little I know of them are that forms are ultimate causes to Plato, and Aristotle relied on the Socratic method/elenchus to posit the law of noncontradiction in his Metaphysics. These are not direct enough to be in the category of Lakoff I think. Winning a Socratic argument (elenchus) isn’t the same as Lakoff is doing (yet Aristotle is a father of science even…), and Plato’s forms are criticized by Aristotle for being too disconnected from the world I believe.

Yet it doesn’t take modern science to imagine what Lakoff is attempting. A completely naturalized conceptual metaphor as and for the law of excluded middle and principle of noncontradiction doesn’t seem outrageous. Think of the reasoning in searching for a missing child as your boat capsizes-you know the child must be on the boat or in the water, if you search the boat it’s time to search the water. I’m not using that scenario Socratically I don’t think, I’m saying it because it may point to a natural reason for us having such capacities of thought and reasoning. My instinct upon hearing it is to disengage the Socratic method and take up a new one for this task. Does that distinction make sense?