文档介绍：e Lakoff
Women, Fire, and
Dangerous Things
What Categories Reveal about the Mind
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicagh Press, Ltd., London
O 1987 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1987
Printed in the United States of America
95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 54321
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
,Preface
Cognitive science is a new field that brings together what is known about
the mind from many academic disciplines: psychology, linguistics, anthro-
pology, philosophy, puter science. It seeks detailed answers to
such questions as: What is reason? How do we make sense of our experi-
ence? What is a conceptual system and how is anized? Do all people
use the same conceptual system? If so, what is that system? If not, exactly
what is there that mon to the way all human beings think? The
questions aren’t new, but some recent answers are.
This book is about the traditional answers to these questions and about
recent research that suggests new answers. On the traditional view, rea-
son is abstract and disembodied. On the new view, reason has a bodily ba-
sis. The traditional view sees reason as literal, as primarily about proposi-
tions that can be objectively either true or false. The new view takes
imaginative aspects of reason-metaphor, metonymy, and mental imag-
ery-as central to reason, rather than as a peripheral and inconsequential
adjunct to the literal.
The traditional account claims that the capacity for meaningful thought
and for reason is abstract and not necessarily embodied in anism.
Thus, meaningful concepts and rationality are transcendental, in the sense
that they transcend, or go beyond, the physical limitations of a-
nism. Meaningful concepts and abstract reason may happen to be embod-
ied in human beings, or in machines, or in anisms-but they
exist abstractly, independent of any particular embodiment. I