Customer Reviews

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

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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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

George Lakoff delivers a book-long explanation of mental categorization from his perspective as a cognitive linguist. When this book was first published, cognitive psychology had recently escaped the limitations of behaviorism and was focusing on the mind. While this was progress, there was for a time an over-emphasis on disembodied computer models of thought. Lakoff's book helped counter this extreme by highlighting ways that our minds draw on culture and on our physical form to create concepts and reason with them.

In Part I: Categories and Cognitive Models, Lakoff describes the classical mathematical definition of a category that has been with us since Aristotle. Members of a category have a set of defining features which nonmembers lack. Various sized squares, for example, are squares because they have four sides of equal length which meet at right angles. He then reviews research evidence that most of the categories we think with do not have this structure. The category "bird" contains members like ostriches that are "less good" members than more central examples like robins and sparrows. He explores the implications of non-classical category structures for metaphors, mental models, and other issues in cognitive science.

Part II: Philosophical Implications examines the implications of the previous section for the philosophical underpinnings of cognitive science. Lakoff rejects objectivism--the view that there is a single, objectively-verifiable external reality--as a basis for knowledge. We must instead develop a cognitive semantics that is based on how humans reason without making a claim that it captures the single correct way of understanding the external world. Lakoff makes an extended argument for a disciplined relativism as a basis for both philosophy and cognitive science. Part III: Case Studies closes the book with extended explorations of the concepts of Anger, "Over," and the use of "there" in American English.

This book continues research and theory development Lakoff has done with Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live. Lakoff's work continued after this book in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought and Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. Perhaps falling victim to the Chomskian curse, Lakoff's later work has taken on a more political focus. It includes The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Both are interesting reading, even by those with different politics than the author's.

The book is recommended for its summary of classical and post-classical accounts of mental categorization. It will be of most interest to students of the history of cognitive science.

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.

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.

I had hoped to get a book that fit its subtitle, "What Categories Reveal about the Mind." What I found was a diatribe against a naive form of objectivism. Certainly, naive objectivism does not work, however it does not take hundreds of pages to point this out.

But I could have put up with that if he had succeeded in other ways. The typical reason he fails is particularly clear when he discusses mathematics. Only one unschooled in mathematical foudations would believe, as Lakoff does, that mathematicians think they can prove which mathematical propositions are absolutely true. That went out not long after Kant proclaimed Euclidean geometry to be the only such truth, an idea trampled by non-Euclidean geometry.

Of course, what mathematicians do is show that if you assume certain axioms then you can show that certain theorems follow. If the axioms are true, then the theorems are true, but mathematics says nothing about the truth of the axioms and thus nothing about absolute truth at all, and Lakoff's arguments fall apart.

Much of the rest of the book also consists of setting up straw men and knocking them down, Unlike the problem with the mathematical example, there is not room in this review to give details, but the careful reader will be often be able to think of counterexamples to Lakoff's numerous supporting instances if he or she can avoid being carried away by the rhetoric.

The book considers only the environmental influences on the creation of categories and misses the role of evolutioand biological influences. This is, a characteristic weakness of taking a mainly psychological view of the subject.

The strongest part of the book is the linguistics, but it fails to hold up the rest to the point where the book is worth owning.

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.