Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

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Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind is a 1987 non-fiction book by George Lakoff, an American cognitive linguist. Published by the University of Chicago Press, the book puts forward a model of cognition argued on the basis of semantics. The book emphasizes the centrality of metaphor, defined as the mapping of cognitive structures from one domain onto another, in the cognitive process. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things explores the effects of cognitive metaphors, both culturally specific and human-universal, on the grammar per se of several languages, and the evidence of the limitations of the classical logical-positivist or Anglo-American School philosophical concept of the category usually used to explain or describe the scientific method. The book's title was inspired by the noun class system of the Dyirbal language, in which the "feminine" category includes nouns for women, water, fire, violence, and certain animals. The book builds on earlier work...

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