Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

Book is in excellent condition! Thank you!

VERY dense read but its interesting

Very good author. Used for further knowledge

From one useful perspective, the human (mammalian) brain is generator of classifications, creating (realizing) neural connections between associated items encountered in the world. "Women, fire, and dangerous things," for example, represent a cluster of related objects in the experience of one culture. Our own (western) associations are metaphorical representations of the way our own brains are "programmed" through experience and education, and trend, not surprisingly, toward the rational and scientific, with a deep underlayment of ideas and understandings that are the legacy of ages. The book is useful in bringing to consciousness much of the linguistic/conceptual baggage we carry unconsciously from the past, and which we need to re-evaluate in a very different present.

I'd say it's a book I'll keep and likely use as a reference but I doubt I'll ever read the whole thing. It goes into WAY too much detail about too many sub-points and comes out being very very dry reading.It's half dictionary, 80% iterative tangents made linear and 100% too much material. The style is also a little odd, being textbookish while also seeming very peer-reviewed journal. Not quite what I was expecting.

If you like history and want to wade through a well documented tome, this book is for you. There are some powerful ideas in the book, such as the notion that many of the concepts in our brains are ordered around functions - round objects roll. I don't recommend this book for everyone, it's pretty heady.

Considering how influential lakoff is and how much technical data he amasses, I ultimately found his conclusions unsupported. His work on metaphor seems much more central to me than this work on categories. If he presented with a bit more tentativeness I think i would have found thenresults more credible.

very interesting and informative

The book is brilliant, though the print quality (Amazon printed) is appalling. As a dyslectic I find it almost impossible to read as the print is so poor, and of very poor resolution.

An exciting book that has helped me to understand better the way my mind works. Particularly valuable section on the question of how we perceive reality. Makes so much more sense than the relativist view that we cannot know reality and that therefore anyone's view is as valid as anyone else's.

A mine of information and although I disagree with his thesis concerning objective knowledge a thoroughly worthwhile purchase.

If you've any interest in language - read this.

Beautiful book on language, metaphor, and embodied cognition. Recommend to Everyone. Enough Said.