Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

What Categories Reveal About the Mind

George Lakoff

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Here was my March and April! A 600-page excursion into cognitive science, philosophy, logic, linguistics, math, and at least a half-dozen other disciplines, all centering on the idea that knowledge and thought are organized and justified much differently than most of us think they are: Instead of knowledge reflecting an objectively determinable world and thought attempting to mirror that world as an internal process, we gain knowledge through interacting with the world, and our thoughts are structured on the basis of those interactions. In other words, human reason is human.

As you might expect, this is a hilariously oversimplified digest of Lakoff’s argument, but the remarkable thing about a book this complex and written by an academic is that its prose is clear as a bell, allowing even nonspecialists to dig into his arguments if you’re willing to think hard enough to comprehend them. (Again, the prose is fine; the arguments are complicated, out of necessity.) An example: At one point, Lakoff discusses the cognitive foundations behind how we treat sentences with the deictic “here” and the verb “come” versus sentences with the deictic “here” and the verb “go,” using pizza sentences as an example:

In the come-sentence, come refers to the movement of the pizza toward the hearer. It is typically uttered when the pizza hasn’t quite reached the hearer. The go-sentence differs in both respects. It is ususally uttered as the pizza (or whatever) reaches the hearer. And the go does not necessarily refer to movement of any sort.

You have to look long and hard to find another academic who doesn't thinks his argument is so grave that he can’t toss that “or whatever” into the sentence, even if it works to keep the focus on the concept. Sports fans will also appreciate Lakoff’s pointless but welcome inclusion references to Rickey Henderson, Pete Rose, Bernard King, and other giants of mid-80s athletics.

One of the key take-home lessons of this book is that metaphorical reasoning, rather than Kantian pure reason, is the foundation of our cognition. This seems to be to be immensely important for structuring our educational system. We are moving towards more and more standardization, with fewer opportunities to make cognitive leaps into the unknown just for the sake of fantasy and play. But the skills we associate with play, sez Lakoff, are actually key to everything we do. The more we metaphorize and understand what we are doing, the more we understand what we are doing when we engage in metaphorical reasoning. It seems to me that kids, who are just learning the metaphors we live by (to borrow the title of another of Lakoff’s books), have a much better grasp of what metaphors imply than adults, who have accepted that (say) metaphors of lust are based on combat scenarios for so long that they’ve stopped thinking about the possible consequences.

I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in exploring for 600 pages what makes your thoughts go ‘round.

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