Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

I was very please with my order. I had my book delivered within a few days, and while the book was advertised as "like new," it's in brand-new condition. Thanks!!

This was the first popular ground-breaking synthesis on the issue of categorization from a cognitive-linguistic perspective at the time of its writing. Unfortunately, althought George Lakoff is a top notch linguistic thinker, his writing is terrible and confusing. I sincerely recommend you read Language, Culture and Mind by Kovesces. He is much better at explaining the ideas in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things than George Lakoff.

There really isn't all that much to this book. Lakoff talks about categorization, but he has nothing special to say about it. And he discusses language, but once again, I wasn't impressed.

Then we get into "objectivist" statements. I found this utterly unrevealing. The point is that some statements are not vague. But other statements are indeed vague, either because it is simply not worth making them more coherent or because it is (gasp) impossible to make them entirely unambiguous. So what?

It is easy to see examples of this in real life. Perhaps a simple example (mine, not the author's) is this: what do you do if you are a hostile witness in a court case and you are asked if the defendant threatened the deceased? You might be able to answer with a simple yes or no. But it is quite possible that (even though the Law of the Excluded Middle appears to say that this is not supposed to happen), both "yes" and "no" are (due to the vagueness of the question) extremely misleading at best, if not outright lies.

Incredibly, that is, in a nutshell, the extent of the wisdom we see in this rather long book. It is an easy read, but it is not very deep.

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 appreciation of and respect for the truths others live by.

In summary, this book held my attention for more than 400 pages, was thought-provoking, challenging, rewarding, and one of the most satisfying intellectual experiences I have encountered to date. I strongly recommend it.

I'd say it's a book I'll keep and likely use as a reference but I doubt I'll ever read the whole thing. It goes into WAY too much detail about too many sub-points and comes out being very very dry reading.

It's half dictionary, 80% iterative tangents made linear and 100% too much material. The style is also a little odd, being textbookish while also seeming very peer-reviewed journal. Not quite what I was expecting.