Lakoff, George;
Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories tell us about the nature of thought
University of Chicago Press, 1987, 632 pages
ISBN 0226468046
topics: | cognitive | psychology | language | category | prototype-theory
This is the book that defined cognitive linguistics, well before that term came to the fore. Much of it is refreshed in Philosophy in the Flesh but the examples are muted there, and this book is still worth a read. The title comes from the fact that in the dying aborigine language Dyirbal, Women, and fire, and dangerous things appear to constitute a linguistic class, sort of a grammatical "gender". 6 RADIAL CATEGORIES "mother": as category, is structured radially, with a central subcategory defined by birth, nurture, etc, + non-central extensions (adoptive mother, birth mother, foster mother, surrogate mother, etc.) - which are extended from the central concept not by rules but by convention. But these extensions are not random - they are determined by the central model and the extensions; birth mother and foster mother are not understood purely on their own terms, but wrt the central model of _mother. 91 Borges' taxonomy: These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance. -- p.92 Borges of course, deals with the fantastic. These not only are not natural human cateogires -- they could not be natural human categories. But part of what makes this passage art, rather than mere fantasy, is that it comes close to the impression a Western reader gets when reading descriptions of nonwestern languages and cultures. The fact is that people around the world categorize things in ways that both boggle the Western mind and stump Western linguists and antropologists.
An excellent example is the classification of things in the world that occurs in traditional Dyirbal, an aboriginal language of Australia. every noun must be preceded by one of four classifiers: bayi, balan, balam, bala These words classify all objects in the Dyirbal universe, and to speak Dyirbal correctly one must use the right classifier before each noun. Here is a brief version of the Dyirbal classifcation of objects in the universe, as described by R.M.W. Dixon (1982): 1. Bayi: men, kangaroos, possums, bats, most snakes, most fishes, some birds, most insects, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears, etc. 2. Balan: women, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidna, some snakes+fishes, most birds, fireflies, scorpions, criekets, the hairy mary grub, anything connected with water or fire, sun and stars, shields, some spears, some trees, etc. 3. Balam: all edible fruit and the plants that bear them, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine, cake. 4. Bala: parts of the body, meat, bees, wind, yamsticks, some spears, most trees, grass, mud, stones, noises and language, etc. Dixon observed that speakers learn the categ's systematically. Proposes this anlaysis: 1. Bayi: (human) males, animals 2. Balan: (human) females, water, fire, fighting 3. Balam: nonflesh food 4. Bala: everything not in the other classes. [NOTE: See also baudhAyana, q. in AK Ramanujan Indian way of thought] : There is a difference between the [Brahmins of the] South and the North on five points. We shall describe the practices of the South: to eat with a person not having received Brahmanical initiation: to eat with one's wife; to eat food prepared the previous day; to marry the daughter of the maternal uncle or paternal aunt. And for the North: to sell wool; to drink spirits' to traffic in animals with two rows of teeth' to take up the profession of arms; to make sea voyages. - Collected essays, A. K. Ramanujan, p.427 ] [ALSO, this poem by dharmakIrti, in subhAshitaratnakoSha #478, in John Brough's translation: The grammar books all say that "mind" is neuter, And so I thought it safe to let my mind Salute her. But now it lingers in embraces tender: For Panini made a mistake, I find, In gender. (Poems from the Sanskrit, 44)]
Dixon further elaborates a "domain-of-experience" principle.
If object A is associated w a domain or experience, then other entities
in that domain are also in the same categ as A. 93
e.g. since fish are categ 1, fishing spears, fishing line, etc are in 1;
similarly trees that bear edible fruit are also in 3, though when the same
word is used to refer to the wood of such a tree, as in firewood etc, then it
is class 4. Fighting implements are in the same class as fire and dangerous
things in class 2.
But "myth and belief" may override any rules. E.g. though birds are animate,
they are believed to be the spirits of dead human females, so they are 2.
Sometimes, some objects with an "important property" may be classified
separately - most often this important property is "harmfulness". e.g. most
fish are 1, but stone fish and gar fish are harmful, so 2. trees bushes
grasses with no edible parts in 4, but stinging trees and stinging vine in
2. Other way also - hawks shd be with birds in 2, but since they are harmful,
they are placed in 1. 94-5
Dixon's achievement is remarkable... has provided a superb example of how
human cognition works. General principles:
* Centrality: basic members of the category are central
* Chaining: complex categs structured by chaining - central members to others
etc. e.g. women linked to the sun, to sunburn, to hairy mary grub
* Experiential domains: may be culture-specific
* Idealized models: myths and beliefs
* Specific knowledge overcomes general knowledge
* The other: conceptual systems can have an "everything else" categ
No common properties: categs on the whole not based on any common properties
Dixon's research was in 1963. By 1983, Dyirbal culture was dying under the
onslaught of English (taught in schools etc). Study of changes based
on several generations of speakers. [Annette Schmidt, 1985]:
age 45+: speak traditional Dyirbal
~35: intermediate, w. some simplified forms --> categs are breaking down
but mythic links are kept; sun, stars, bird are in 2 with women, as is
fire. Fishing is lost as a domain relev to categorizn, fish are in 1,
but fishing spears/lines etc have gone to 4. water is still with 2.
but speakers show variations; one speaker has lost
the danger link (stonefish/gar in 1, nettles in 4), one spkr still has
it. two speakers lost the dog and bandicoot as exceptional animals in
2, they went to 1 with other animals.
much younger: very simple - categ 3 lost completely. Now:
1. Bayi - human males, animates
2. Balan: human females
3. Bala: everything else
on the death of Dyirbal
Young people’s Dyirbal... as spoken by the "Rock’n-Rollers"
Loss of prestige: "Talking Guwal [Dyirbal] to a waybala [white person], it’s like singing an’ you’re ashamed of your voice. "
Correction of young semi-speakers by elders:
"If I say `Oh, that's my gaya [mother's younger brother] there', she'll probably say `You can't say gaya to me... You gotta say mugu [mother's elder brother]’."
Daughter: nganaji gotta cook-iman bala you know.
we -TRANS it
"We've got to cook that, you know"
Mother: nyajun!
cook
"You mean `cook'!"
Daughter: nyaju, cook-iman ... bala
cook, TRANS it
"Nyaju, cook it, whatever..."
Mother: nginda mijiji-bin!
you white-woman-INTRANS
"You've become a white woman!"
"That Phyllis, she don’t talk Guwal right. She mixes up the English... she got it wrong."
"They won’t think [in Dyirbal]. They sorta can’t get round their own language."
NOTE: These losses support the radial analysis - center is retained
Evan Pritchard on Lakoff:
How concepts are created: Lakoff
In Dyirbal, an Australian aboriginal language, there are four categories:
bayi, balan, balam, and bala. Everything that exists can be put into these
four categories. As you might expect, if a people have only four
categories for things, then some things could put together that we might
not perceive to belong together. Specifically, women, fire, and dangerous
things are all in the same category (balan).
Lakoff explains how categorization in Dyirbal, or any other language,
could have happened using three principles.
* Domain of experience principle, so things that are experienced in the
same way are categorized together.
* Myth and belief principle, things that are linked by myth or belief are
categorized together.
* Important property principle, things that have an important property are
categorized together.
In Dyirbal, bayi and balan are categories for human male and human female,
balam is for non-human living things, and bala is for everything
else. Women are placed in the balan category (domain of experience
principle), and women are believed to be related to the sun (myth and
belief principle), which is related to fire, so fire is also placed in the
balan category, but an important property of fire is that it's dangerous
(important property principle), so dangerous things are also placed in the
balan category.
The Japanese classifier hon is typically applied for
long thin objects: sticks, canes, pencils, rope, etc.
Radial category - the center of the category constitutes of long thin
objects.
Non-central extensions:
• Trajectories: hits in baseball, serves in volleyball
• Communications (because of long, thin media: wires, and, in early
Japan, scrolls; also, communications are trajectories according to the
CONDUIT metaphor): letters, telephone calls, radio & TV programs
• Activities done with long, thin objects: martial arts contests (swords and
staffs), medical injections (needles)
• Activities like those done with long, thin objects: judo contests (no
staffs or swords), Zen koan contests
All these usages "radiate" from the central usage of "long thin objects"
--
The objectivist paradigm --> experientialism
BASIC REALISM: common to both objectivism and experientialism
- real world exists, external to human beings,
and includes the reality of human experience
- links human concepts and other aspects of reality
- truth - not based merely on internal coherence
- stable knowledge exists in the world
- rejects the view that diff conceptual systems are as good a the other
two aspects:
- METAPHYSICS: nature of world, indep of human understanding
- EPISTEMOLOGY: nature of human cognition, language, knowledge
OBJECTIVIST METAPHYSICS
reality consists of:
entities,
properties of entities
relations that hold among these entities
--> classical theory of categories --> set-theoretic implementn is possible
OBJECTIVE CATEGORIES:
[since properties have an objective existence]
entities in the world form objectively existing categories based on theis
shared objective properties. 161
Essentialism: distinguishes shared "essential" properties, as opp to shared
accidental properties":
NATURAL KINDS: [characterized by] some 'essential nature' which the thing
shares with other members of the natural kind. What the essential nature is
is not a matter of language analysis but of scientific theory construction.
[Putnam 75, p.104]
David Hilbert (see Kleene 1967, chap 4) came up with a solution that was
completely general; his program of formalism. Hilbert viewed mathematical
proofs as merely matters of form, with questions of meaning put aside to be
discussed outside mathematics proper in "metamathematics." Mathematics,
Hilbert suggested, is the study of meaningless symbols, and mathematical
proofs are sequences of strings of uninterpreted symbols, with the lines of a
proof related to one another by regular rules. In a formal axiomatic system,
as Hilbert defined it, axioms are strings of uninterpreted symbols, and
theorems are other strings of uninterpreted symbols derived from the axioms
by rules. - 231
Similarly, mathematical logic is technically no more than the study of
sequences of symbols strings (proof theory) and the way symbol strings can be
paired with structures continaing entities and sets (model theory). What
makes it the study of reason? The answer is: objectivist philosophy plus a
way of understanding the models. It is only by assuming the correctness of
objectivist philosophy and by imposing such an understanding that
mathematical logic can be viewed as the study of reason in general. Such an
understanding has been imposed by objectivist philosophers. There is nothing
inherent to mathematical logic that makes it the study of reason.
Hilbert was wrong about mathematics being nothing more than the study of
meaningless symbols and their relationship to meaningless structures. Two
things make formal mathematics mathematics: (a) the way those symbols and
structures are understood as being about familiar mathematical domains and
(b) the detailed justifications for adopting such an understanding. The
assumptions of objectivist philosophy have been assumed to be sufficient
justification. But that is no justification at all. What is needed is
empirical justification. - 223/4
A New Realism:
Thus, Putnam concludes, there cannot be such a thing as "exactly one true and
complete description of 'the way the world is'" -- that is, there can be no
God's eye view of reality. The crucial words here are "description" and
"view." They presuppose an external perspective: a symbol system external to
reality, related to reality by a reference relation that gives meaning to the
symbols. Putnam is not saying that there is no reality. And he is not saying
that there is no "way the world is." He is not denying basic realism. He is
only denying a certain epistomology. He is not saying that we cannot have
correct knowledge. What ihe is saying is that we cannot have a priviledged
correct description from an externalist perspective. - 260
(from http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Lakoff.html):
"Knowledge, like truth, is relative to understanding. Our folk view of
knowledge as being absolute comes from the same source as our folk view
that truth is absolute, which is the folk theory that there is only one
way to understand a situation. When that folk theory fails, and we have
multiple ways of understanding, or 'framing,' a situation, then
knowledge, like truth, becomes relative to that understanding. Likewise,
when our knowledge is stable and secure, knowledge based on that
understanding is stable and secure.
Is such knowledge 'real knowledge'? Well, it's as real as our knowledge
ever gets--real enough for all but the most seasoned skeptics." (300)
Lakoff argues that experience is made possible and structured by preconceptual structures-- "directly meaningful concepts" roughly the same for all human beings that thus provide "certain fixed points in the objective evaluation of situations". He divides them into basic-level structures and image-schema structures, and acknowledges there may be other kinds. Basic-level structures arise "as a result of our capacities for gestalt perception, mental imagery, and motor movement" and manifest as basic-level categories such as hunger and pain, water, wood, and stone, people and cats, and (perhaps more surprisingly) tables and houses (302). Image schemas are spatial mappings such as source-path-goal, center-periphery, and container. It is out of these basic cognitive tools that more complex cognitive models of reality are constructed. --- blurb 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.