Women, Fire and Dangerous Things...

Note: The OP in this thread is Sophroniscus. The nic disappeared when we changed templates, which didn't support notation that wasn't a registered user. So Guest: Sophroniscus.

Been reading a book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff...

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Lakoff.html

It's about the categories. It's quite interesting but if seriously flawed by the author's virtually total ignorance regarding the classical theory...

[CFTraveler]

Well, after swimming through the waters and meandering through the forest of evolving ideas, I found it diaphanously vaporous.
(Couldn't cram one more metapor in there, but tried. ).

[journyman161]

While semantics is important to understanding, the meaning of meaning is far more important. Lakoff seems to have missed the entire 20th century & it's development of a multitude of greys - he looks at the black & white world of the believer & forgets entirely that science & thinking people have moved beyond into relativity & even beyond that.

Strangely this thread is presented like something new but the movement towards relativity was begun over 100 years back. Only believers (not thinkers) think in the way Lakoff tries to define as how things are. The concepts presented are a little old fashioned - Count Alfred Korzybski went beyond them in the 1930's.

One should point out that the end result of such thinking is the obliteration of traditional religions - there is no room for grey or relativity in the black & white of good & evil.

IMO - not worth reading for anyone who has had an original thought in the last 30 years. The title turns out to be weirdly appropriate - the world has moved beyond seeing women as hazardous - except for the rednecks & various throwbacks to primitive times when the monotheistic male-God dominated religions overwhelmed the pantheistic earth/goddess religions that originated the term religion.

[CFTraveler]

While semantics is important to understanding, the meaning of meaning is far more important. Lakoff seems to have missed the entire 20th century & it's development of a multitude of greys - he looks at the black & white world of the believer & forgets entirely that science & thinking people have moved beyond into relativity & even beyond that.

Strangely this thread is presented like something new but the movement towards relativity was begun over 100 years back. Only believers (not thinkers) think in the way Lakoff tries to define as how things are. The concepts presented are a little old fashioned - Count Alfred Korzybski went beyond them in the 1930's.

One should point out that the end result of such thinking is the obliteration of traditional religions - there is no room for grey or relativity in the black & white of good & evil.

IMO - not worth reading for anyone who has had an original thought in the last 30 years. The title turns out to be weirdly appropriate - the world has moved beyond seeing women as hazardous - except for the rednecks & various throwbacks to primitive times when the monotheistic male-God dominated religions overwhelmed the pantheistic earth/goddess religions that originated the term religion.

So I take it you didn't like it?

[journyman161]

Um... yep, you take it correctly. Can't be nice to have a view of the world like his but there was no need to share it in a book.

I think the book is probably a good summary of the psychology of the categories. But I have a number of objections to what he calls the classical theory. In this message, I would examine one of his claims...

From the time of Aristotle to the later work of Wittgenstein, categories were thought be well understood and unproblematic.

~ page 6.

I would argue that Lakoff is merely continuing with a myth, that Aristotle held a stranglehold on Western philosophy.

It is far from clear to me that Aristotle's ideas regarding the Categories were well accepted by subsequent Greek thinkers -- after the time of Aristotle, Greek philosophy shifted to Stoicism. I have heard that the Stoics, in fact, proposed an alternative list of categories, though I can not at the moment supply a reference to that effect.

Afterward, Ammonius Saccas and his followers popularized a return to both Plato and Aristotle -- Neo-Platonism.. But Plotinus, the most significant of the Neo-Platonists, sharply criticized Aristotle's Categories. It was not until Porphyry wrote a commentary on the Categories that Aristotle's ideas were revived. Subsequently, Boethius wrote an important commentary on the Categories as well.

But that was not the end of the story. Immanuel Kant rejected Aristotle's Categories and proposed an alternative list of his own. Later, Charles Sanders Peirce produced a version of the Categories fundamentally different.

Lakoff seems to be completely ignorant of this history. The book seems to make no reference to Plotinus or Peirce. It contains only one almost irrelevant reference to Kant.

I think the book is probably a good summary of the psychology of the categories. But I have a number of objections to what he calls the classical theory. In this message, I would examine one of his claims...

From the time of Aristotle to the later work of Wittgenstein, categories were thought be well understood and unproblematic.

~ page 6.

I would argue that Lakoff is merely continuing with a myth, that Aristotle held a stranglehold on Western philosophy.

It is far from clear to me that Aristotle's ideas regarding the Categories were well accepted by subsequent Greek thinkers -- after the time of Aristotle, Greek philosophy shifted to Stoicism. I have heard that the Stoics, in fact, proposed an alternative list of categories, though I can not at the moment supply a reference to that effect.

Afterward, Ammonius Saccas and his followers popularized a return to both Plato and Aristotle -- Neo-Platonism.. But Plotinus, the most significant of the Neo-Platonists, sharply criticized Aristotle's Categories. It was not until Porphyry wrote a commentary on the Categories that Aristotle's ideas were revived. Subsequently, Boethius wrote an important commentary on the Categories as well.

But that was not the end of the story. Immanuel Kant rejected Aristotle's Categories and proposed an alternative list of his own. Later, Charles Sanders Peirce produced a version of the Categories fundamentally different.

Lakoff seems to be completely ignorant of this history. The book seems to make no reference to Plotinus or Peirce. It contains only one almost irrelevant reference to Kant.

I suppose Lakoff might object that I am trying to interpret his book using classical ideas when I ought to adopt his theories on faith alone.

Well, I suppose I can try. To do that I must attempt to understand what he means by the classical theory. So we must find a prototype for the word classical for which the statement "From the time of Aristotle to the later work of Wittgenstein, categories were thought be well understood and unproblematic" is true.

That in itself is a tall order, since clearly Aristotle, Plotinus, Porphyry, Kant and Peirce seem to disagree with each other. But if we add in the following the task seems impossible...

Thought is the mechanical manipulation of abstract symbols.
The mind is an abstract machine, manipulating symbols essentially in the way a computer does, that is, by algorithmic computation.
Symbols (e.g., words and mental representations) get their meaning via correspondences to things in the external world. All meaning is of this character.

~ page xii.

For it is far from clear what sort of mechanical manipulation Aristotle might have had in mind. What sort of computer might he have had in mind? History gives us few answers to that inquiry. There is the abacus, I suppose...

[journyman161]

Well, they were probably a little more sophisticated than just an abacus. Classical history leads us to think of anyone before us as being primitive & lacking ingenuity. The Antikythera device has been the subject of study & has proven far more complex than its degraded appearance would suggest.

As a device it was an amazingly complex piece of equipment; as a computer it suggests a line of development of devices that has disappeared from our histories. Such complexity & such development of technology doesn't come from nowhere or one sudden spurt of creativity - there is a long line of development in the background of this device.

Well, they were probably a little more sophisticated than just an abacus. Classical history leads us to think of anyone before us as being primitive & lacking ingenuity. The Antikythera device has been the subject of study & has proven far more complex than its degraded appearance would suggest.

As a device it was an amazingly complex piece of equipment; as a computer it suggests a line of development of devices that has disappeared from our histories. Such complexity & such development of technology doesn't come from nowhere or one sudden spurt of creativity - there is a long line of development in the background of this device.

Complex, perhaps. But could it manipulate abstract symbols in the way a computer does?

[journyman161]

Computers don't do that anyway, in spite of appearances. Computers add up & subtract 0's & 1's and that's all they do.

Yes it could manipulate symbols in the sense you could enter info & extract answers, just like our computers do. It was far more complex than an abacus & experts think there is nothing anywhere near as complex for at least 1000 years after the device went to the sea floor.

So there were complex mechanisms & a lot of knowledge around a long time before we thought possible & that we are only finding out about in recent times.