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Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
 
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Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things [Paperback]

George Lakoff (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
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Product Description

From Library Journal

Lakoff reviews a wide range of studies in "cognitive semantics," a new field that attempts to understand mind through empirical studies of the way people categorize. He provides several detailed conceptual "case studies," which aptly bring out the richness of the English language, and Whorfian-type examinations of the way different cultures view the world as exemplified in their language (the book's title derives from a classification in Dyirbal, an aboriginal language of Australia). Though this new "science" is supposed to yield insights more accurate and useful than traditional (i.e., "non-empirical") philosophy, the approach to philosophy here is superficial. For academic linguistics collections. Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Book Description

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist

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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.4 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightning reading, Mar 6 2002
By 
Evelyne Trahan (Quebec City, Quebec, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Paperback)
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?
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars An anti-objectivist screed, Jun 26 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Paperback)
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.

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4.0 out of 5 stars 4 stars for readability, 2 stars for presentation, July 14 2004
By 
ocbizlaw (Mission Viejo, California USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Paperback)
Almost anyone will sound brilliant if first they set up a hopelessly lame excuse for the status quo (what Lakoff calls the "Traditionalist View"), then knock it down with vigor. In every case, Lakoff's examples can be readily explained using the traditionalist view by simply adding finer and finer categories and allowing them to overlap.

Still, the book does trigger thought on the issues.

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