Women, fire, and dangerous things
Focusing on studies of how humans categorize objects and ideas, this book examines the new understanding of human thought which proposes that human reason is imaginative, metaphorical, and intrinsically linked with the human body.
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10recommend
26mentions
18people
2008–2025years
54% recommend46% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Lakoff has written other fascinating books...
Favorite fascinating George Lakoff book: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
- "women, fire, and dangerous things" by Lakoff for the meta on categories in general :)
- Make sure to follow up "Metaphors We Live By" with a read of Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things", which explains how meaning is constructed by ultimately relating sounds to body experiences, a must-read for the interested student of linguistics (amateur or professional).
Lakoff himself talking about cognitive semantics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFgFjdCo2Js
In software architecture, metaphors may help us to better identify objects and their interaction patterns.
- Agreed. One sentence in the article embodies this problem:
> As long as the dumb AI is unable to guess our wishes, there will be a need to specify them using a precise language. We already have such language, it’s called math.
Math is wonderful and elegant, but it is useless (in itself) to specify things in the real world. You need tons of conceptualisation and operationalisation and common sense etc. for the foreseeable future.
Heck, logic is useless for the real world - everyone knows the example that “a bachelor is a man that is not married”, but even if you can implement it as a conjunction of two logical predicates, then try to define, with logic a computer can understand, what “man” is, or “married”, or “game”, or “taxable income” or “murder” or “fake news”. Go on, use math and category theory. Good luck.
EDIT to add: For a wonderful overview of the problems with the naive Aristotelian view of definition (easily captured by predicate logic) in the real world, see George Lakoff’s book “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind”.
- The only book I've ever bought judging by the cover (well, the title) only was George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. It wasn't what I expected (what did I expect??), but it was insightful and thought provoking. One of the first books I've come across that shows you that the world is much, much more complicated than the simple (and "obvious") stuff we are taught in school.
- More helpful responses:
1. This sounds like a great idea: In trying to do it, you will learn a lot about all the ways it won't work. (It seems to me.) I started writing a program once to understand poetry & jokes. I learned a lot, like just how much humans have to know to understand this stuff. You have to know about everything just to understand one word! Best example I know of this: see the chapter on 'over' in Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.
2. It sounds a bit like - music! Maybe you could use music for that? Hmm well no. But maybe look at Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music, which is a remarkable attempt to spell out explicitly what the elements/motifs/phrases/melodic units in music are saying. I guess any partially-facial-expression-based language would have a lot in common with that.
