A Review of George Lakoff's Women, Fire, And Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

Title

A Review of George Lakoff's Women, Fire, And Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

Description

This is a review that can be read online for free (with registraton at JSTOR) of the ground-breaking and interdisciplinary work of George Lakoff. Lakoff draws from Philosophy, Language and a variety of diverse disciplines such as Anthropology, Linguistics, Rhetoric, Communication and Philosophy of Science. The importance of human categorization and the findings from many disciplines about the processes of categorization in human societies and cultures across the globe are discussed. It turns out that most categories are not naturally occurring, but are products of a human categorization that is unconscious, implicit, subject to the context, with fuzzy boundaries, a few prototypes, and involving reason, emotion, and imagination. That is, categorization is based on human experience.

Contents of Lakoff's book include:

Acknowledgments
Preface
Book I: The Mind beyond the Machine
Part I: Categories and Cognitive Models
1. The Importance of Categorization
2. From Wittgenstein to Rosch
3. Prototype Effects in Language
4. Idealized Cognitive Models
5. Metonymic Models
6. Radical Categories
7. Features, Stereotypes, and Defaults
8. More about Cognitive Models
9. Defenders of the Classical View
10. Review
Part II: Philosophical Implications
11. The Objectivist Paradigm
12. What's Wrong with Objectivist Metaphysics
13. What's Wrong with Objectivist Cognition
14. The Formalist Enterprise
15. Putnam's Theorem
16. A New Realism
17. Cognitive Semantics
18. Whorf and Relativism
19. The Mind-As-Machine Paradigm
20. Mathematics as a Cognitive Activity
21. Overview
Book II: Case Studies
Introduction
1. Anger
2. Over
3. There-Constructions
Afterword
References
Name Index
Subject Index

Subject

Cognitive Science

Creator

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.

Publisher

JSTOR

Date

1989

Relation

Format

Pdf

Language

English

Type

Text

Comments

Collection

Citation

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., “A Review of George Lakoff's Women, Fire, And Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind,” Antiracism Digital Library, accessed April 20, 2024, https://sacred.omeka.net/items/show/63.