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Title: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff ISBN: 0-226-46804-6 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: January, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Breaking the Mindforged Manacles
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Enlightning reading
Comment: 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?
Rating: 2
Summary: An anti-objectivist screed
Comment: 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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Title: Metaphors We Live by by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson ISBN: 0226468011 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson ISBN: 0465056741 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1999 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff ISBN: 0226467716 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor by George Lakoff, Mark Turner ISBN: 0226468127 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: April, 1989 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff, Rafael E. Nunez, Rafael Nuñez ISBN: 0465037712 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 07 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $23.50 |
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