I had previously read his Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. It get into notions like "strict father" and "nurturant parent" moralities.
But the big point is that we humans are not rational, logical scientists. We are animals, social animals, and our brains are coded to live -- survive -- in the world. Like other animals.
George Lakoff is a linguist, and Women, Fire and Dangerous Things is about linguistics, about how we humans came to realize that the traditional notion of categorization, handed down for a couple thousand years from the Greek philosophers, that we categorize things abstractly, is wrong. Here is how he describes the "classic theory of categories" as "abstract containers."
From the time of Aristotle to the later work of Wittgenstein, categories were thought [to] be well understood and unproblematic. They were understood to be abstract containers, with things either inside or outside the category. Things were assumed to be in the same category if and only if they have certain properties in common.
In fact, we are all taught to believe this. I suppose it has to do with our worship of logic and reason. We logical reasoners observe the world and mentally put things into the right boxes. Because logic.
All wrong, says Lakoff. In fact, beginning with the work of linguist Eleanor Rosch, our categories reflect our human embodiment. She noted that, in fact, things are not either "in" or "out" of a category, but graded.
Rosch... demonstrated that categories, in general, have best examples (called "prototypes")[.]
In other words, we humans use categories "to perceive, to form mental images, to learn and remember, to organize things learned, and to communicate efficiently."
And, it should be added, animals do this, and we humans have been doing it long before we created our modern cult of reason.
Let us illustrated this with Wittgenstein, who got deep into the idea of a "game." There are all kinds of games, from ring-around-the-rosy to chess. But what really is a game, the prototypical idea of "game?" Says Wittgenstein:
Someone says to me "show the children a game." I teach them gaming with dice, and the other says "I didn't mean that sort of game."
Yes, Ludi. Stop teaching the kids to gamble! That's not a good idea of a game!
So what Lakoff is saying is that categories are not abstract but coded into our bodies and our brains and our culture, as part of survival etc. And what we categorize at a "basic level" are the common objects of daily life: things like "dog" "cat" "chair." But this is just the basic level: we categorize dogs as representative of "animal" and chairs as representative of "furniture." Thus this sort of hierarchy:
| Superordinate | Animal | Furniture |
| Basic Level | Dog | Chair |
| Subordinate | Retriever | Rocker |
Guess what. Human children learn to categorize at the basic level by age 2, and are pretty good at it by age 3. At age 4 they start to show skills at the subordinate and superordinate levels.
But, it is at the edges that things start to get complicated. For instance whatabout birds?
[Rosch's] experimental ranking shows that subjects view robins and sparrows as the best examples of birds, with owls and eagles lower down the rankings and ostriches, emus, and penguins among the worst examples.
Yes. When we go to the zoo we are amused by ostriches and emus and penguins. Because they appear exotic to us.
You can see from this that humans do not categorize things in the world as if they were philosophers and scientists. They categorize things in ways that are useful and meaningful them in their daily lives.
Actually, when you look searchingly at science, it has followed the same paradigm. For instance Linnaeus puts "genera" at the center of his classification system as "'practical units of classification' upon which all biologists should be able to agree."
The same thing happens in modern physics, especially beginning with the problem of light. Was light made out of particles or waves, typical basic-level categories? The problem for all of us, where modern physics is concerned, is that basic-level categories and notions are not adequate to describe our notions of the micro-level of quantum mechanics and the macro-level of general relativity and the presumed vastness of the universe. So we have sophisticated math to do it for us. But when physicists are talking about physics they adapt ordinary concepts from daily life as metaphors for the impossible things going on at the macro and micro level. Or they show how sophisticated they are by using names like "quark" from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
All of which reminds us that the universe is nothing like it appears to us through our senses and our human-concocted categories. Which goes back to Kant and his declaration that we do not know things-in-themselves but only appearances.
But notice that our modern physics has a Creation Myth, called the Big Bang, and it has all kinds of theories about what happens at the end of the universe, as humans have always had all kinds of theories about the end of times, and "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in general.
So scientists are humans, after all.
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