Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

I found this to be one of the most interesting books I have ever read. For me it's a revolutionary work in the sense that very rarely do books such as this come into my life -- maybe once every five years -- and have the ability to forever change the way I think about the world. And as with all such important books, it is iconoclastic and will not please everyone. Some will no doubt hate it, but most of the objectivist academics have no doubt long since dismissed it as nonsense. Most assuredly it is not without its faults. For example, Lakoff tends to rail a bit much against what he calls "objectivist" viewpoints (those who espouse some flavor of the correspondence theory of truth), which includes pretty much all of the present day scientific community as well as the majority of Anglo-American analytic philosophers. In addition, the book is admittedly long-winded and a little repetitious in places. By the time I had gotten to the end of the second case study, I was totally burned out and could not continue any further. But it wasn't disenchantment with the book so much as the desire to just move on to something else. I have yet to read the third case study, but I will eventually. In fact, I know that I will come back to this book many times in the future to refer to the numerous insights which lie scattered everywhere throughout the text. Contrary to what you may have been told, Lakoff is NOT an egotistical academic. He is quick to give credit and praise to others for many or most of the ideas contained in this work. Nor is he vain and arrogant; on occasion he even makes fun of himself. He does not talk down to the reader, but his expectation is that you are able to follow his argument, which is intelligent-undergraduate level. To be sure, he has not tried to water down the ideas to appeal to a wide audience of couch potatoes. I especially like the format of this book: the larger type is easy on my older eyes; excellent paper quality, generous margins, little or no typos: All make for a first-rate reading experience, a real treat. The generous margins are useful for jotting down quick notes on the side for future reference, as I did repeatedly thoughout this book. I will end with one example of the many insights that fill this fascinating book: Viewing truth as a radial concept forms the foundation for a mature relativism "Because, as we have seen, truth cannot be characterized as correspondence to a physical reality, we must recognize truth as a human concept, subject to the laws of human thought... There are central and non-central truths. The central truths are characterized in terms of directly understood concepts, concepts that fit the pre-conceptual structure of experience. Such concepts are (a) basic-level concepts in the physical domain, and (b) general schemas emerging from experience...." The fact that there are central truths and non-central truths means that by realizing that the truths we live by are not central, we can gain an

I've just started reading this book for a course on Classification Theory as it applies to Library Science and I have to say I'm quite impressed. Not only is it very readable (a special treat in itself as most text books read like stereo instructions) but it' on a fascinating subject that needs far more coverage today than it gets currently. Other reviews have summerized the contents so I'll just add that for anyone with even a passing interest in cognitive linguistics, this is where you should start.

Definitively in my top 5 (High Fidelity?) books to bring on a desert island. Lakoff manage to be brilliant and sometimes funny while debunking one of the oldest theory in the world (the Aristotelician view on the nature of categories). Who said formal logic, linguistic and cognitive psychology are boring?

George Lakoff, the premier cognitve scientist, overwhelms the reader with evidence that there is no disntiction between the body and the mind. All humans think in terms of the relationships it has with the body. The categories whether it is a radial or idealized cognitive model, show this relationship between the body and the mind, not separated from it. Moreso, the metaphors humans use have a connection with the body and mind relationship as well. Unlike the previous philosophers and linguists, these metaphors are intelligable if they are investigated with the proper methods as Lakoff shows. This leads to conclude that their is no such thing as an objective reality, and that due to putting all these bits of information into 5 to 7 main categories, humans overlook and categorize things in terms of characteristics that they look for to put it into categories. A truly objective reality is a chaotic reality. This book, when applied to the different cultures, does put a more relativistic approach as to how one should study a culture. Without a deep investigation into the language, there is no possible way to understand how one thinks. Categories are hidden in the language not just in the grammar, phonolgy or morphology, but in metaphors as well. Lakoff gives excellent methods to do this, and therefore, a much better way to understand human thought.

When I read this book for the first time, it was like a revelation - Lakoff concentrates on the way people *really* think, not the way philosophers would like them to. His approach: We use cognitive models that we acquired in childhood to solve almost every problem - to estimate, to schedule, to infer. What strikes me most about the cognitive science of metaphor is the possibility to apply it to many fields like computer interface design, social sciences, linguistics, you name it. His argument is partly very sophisticated, yet understandable also for a non-philosopher, and he comes up with lots of examples and evidence. This book has become a kind of "creativity technique" to me, I find myself developing new ideas based on Lakoff's approach all the time. Among the people who have no scientific interest in the matter, I recommend this book to designers, programmers and everybody in the field of communication. It is worth every minute you read.