In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff debunks objectivism by showing how categorization and reasoning are shaped by experience and embodied cognition.
Categorization is not a matter to be taken lightly. There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech. (5)
The view of reason as disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols comes with an implicit theory of categorization. (8)
Family resemblances is the idea that members of a category may be related to one another without all members having any properties in common that define the category. (12)
Centrality is the idea that some members of a category may be “better examples” of that category than others. (12)
Membership gradience is the idea that at least some categories have degrees of membership and no clear boundaries. (12)
Basic-level categorization is the idea that categories are not merely organized in a hierarchy from the most general to the most specific, but are also organized so that categories that are cognitively basic are “in the middle.” (13)
Basic-level primacy is the idea that basic-level categories are functionally and epistemologically primary with respect to the following factors: gestalt perception, image formation, motor movement, knowledge organization, ease of cognitive processing (learning, recognition, memory) and ease of linguistic expression. (13)
Basicness of level has no objective status external to human beings. (38)
The most representative members of a category are called prototypical members. (41)
Robins are judged to be more representative of the category BIRD than are chickens, penguins, or ostriches. (41)
Robins, owls, and penguins are all 100 percent members of the BIRD category. (45)
In the case of a graded category like tall man, which is fuzzy and does not have rigid boundaries, prototype effects may result from degree of category membership, while in the case of bird, which does have rigid boundaries, the prototype effects must result from some other aspect of internal category structure. (45)
Examples of [ad hoc categories] are things to take from one’s home during a fire and what to get for a birthday present. In such cases, the nature of the category is principally determined by goals. (45)
Basic-level distinctions are “the generally most useful distinctions to make in the world.” (49)
Categories occur in systems and such systems included contrasting categories (e.g., chair, stool). (52)
The main thesis of this book is that we organize our knowledge by means of structures called idealized cognitive models. (68)
Our model of a week is idealized. Seven-day weeks do not exist objectively in nature. (69)
When the cluster of models that jointly characterize a concept diverge (e.g., donor mother, birth mother, stepmother) there is still a strong pull to view one as the most important. (75)
The classification is built into the language. (92)
We use cognitive models in trying the understand the world. (118)
Much of what has given the classical theory its appeal over the centuries is that it meshes with our folk theory and seems like common sense. (118)
There is a common idea that there is a single correct taxonomy of natural things—plants, animals, minerals, etc. (118)
There are at least two kinds of taxonomic models available to traditional biologists: the cladistic and the phenetic. (121)
Seeing typically involves categorizing. (126)
Seeing involves seeing-as. (127)
Philosophy matters. It matters more than most people realize, because philosophical ideas that have developed over the centuries enter our culture in the form of a world view and affect us in thousands of ways. (157)
Objectivism [involves] assuming that the mind can function as a mirror of nature. (162)
Objectivism [assumes] there is a correct categorization of things in the world independent of human perception or cognition—what we might call a God’s eye view. (164)
Objectivist cognition strongly constrains what the categories of mind can be like. (165)
In the classical theory, hierarchical categorization and cross-categorization (e.g., boy is both male and child) are the only organizations of categories that exist. (167)
It is this [minimal distinction principle] that has led scholars to try to find one essential characteristic of man that distinguishes him from the other animals. (167)
Objectivists hold that words have correct definitions. (172)
According to evolutionary biology, species are not natural kinds. (187)
Classical categories and natural kinds are remnants of pre-Darwinian philosophy. (195)
The CONTAINER schema defines the most basic distinction between IN and OUT. (271)
We understand our own bodies as containers—perhaps the most basic things we do are ingest and excrete, take air into our lungs and breathe it out. But our understanding of our own bodies as containers seems small compared with all the daily experiences we understand in CONTAINER terms. (271)
Book Notes
After reading Lakoff’s book, I asked ChatGPT a couple of questions. First, “Why was Eleanor Rosch’s doctoral thesis on category formation paradigm-changing?”
Eleanor Rosch’s doctoral thesis — Natural Categories (1971) — was paradigm-changing because it overturned the dominant classical view of categorization that had guided Western philosophy and psychology for over two millennia, from Aristotle to mid-20th-century cognitive science. Her work replaced the idea of categories as rigidly defined sets of necessary and sufficient features with an empirically grounded, psychologically realistic model based on prototypes and family resemblances.
It empirically validated Wittgenstein’s philosophical intuition.
Second, “Is Rosch’s thesis more compatible with a liberal or conservative mindset?”
Eleanor Rosch’s thesis on category formation isn’t political in intent, but its epistemological stance — how it treats knowledge and human understanding — aligns more closely with the liberal than the conservative mindset.
Rosch’s work — showing that categories are not sharply defined but rather graded and overlapping — sits naturally with the liberal tendency toward cognitive flexibility and tolerance for ambiguity.
Rosch’s paradigm shift undermines the epistemic structure underlying conservative essentialism — the idea that categories (e.g., gender, race, morality) have intrinsic, immutable essences.
I first read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things in the 1990s. As I recall, it made my head hurt, in a good way. In re-reading it a quarter century later, it strikes me our culture has yet to absorb its insights, and “common sense” is impervious to science.
As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome.