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

This is a long book with a great deal to say about the pros and cons of the objectivist approach to linguistics and semantics. Who should read it?

Academics and practioners whose work touches on linguistics and semantics? Very probably. This might be an excellent book for these people. As I am not one myself, I cannot say for sure.

Philosophers / philosphy students? It has some interesting bits and pieces, but be prepared to skim. It is not a top-rate book on philosophy.

The interested layperson? You have to skim a lot. I found myself thinking "this is academic" and "this is just semantics" a lot. There are hundreds of pages about arguments I think could only be of interest to someone who has studied / is studying this at college / university.

Good bits include:
* The difference between statements such as "John is stingy" and "John is thrifty". (Both imply John is careful with money, but with negative and positive spins)
* How people can react the same language in different ways according to the mental models in their minds.

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.

Lakoff's is one of the best books ever written on the nature of language and cognition, vastly more original and powerful than all the recent, more popular attempts combined. It has already influenced Gerald Edelman and other sensitive minds; and its influence, I predict, will spread in generations to come.

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.

this book explores the way language is a reflection of the inner workings of the brain. it specifically examines the way we think about grouping things. for instance: should red and orange belong to the super-category "color"? how about lavender? which is the best example of "color"?

as a web designer, i deal constantly with hierarchies and the ways that things are grouped together. this thick tome on cognitive science made me rethink some of my strategies. although dealing with very complex issues and obviously not for casual reading, i really appreciated the way the author delineates his thinking so clearly. one example is that he rarely drops names without explaining in some detail the contributions of the person cited. i ended up xeroxing several sections fo this book for my coworkers.