Women, Fire, and Dangerous Theories: A Critique of Lakoff's Theory of Categorization

Abstract

George Lakoff (1987) put forward a new account of the standard prototype effects in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (WF&DT) that has become increasingly popular since the book's publication. We believe, however, that the theory presented in WF&DT remains untenable for a number of reasons. Briefly, we argue that (a) confusions about the difference between concepts and conceptualizations led to apparent contradictions in his position; (b) his removal of prototypes from the explanation of prototype effects left open a wide range of possible and plausible explanations of such effects, many of which derive from the very objectivist paradigm he criticized; (c) his attempt to replace the compositionality of language with the notion of "motivation" failed, primarily because his account of motivation left it underspecified and, ultimately, took his theory out of the realm of scientific investigation; and (d) his idealized cognitive models the core of his cognitive theory--are inadequate explanations that seem to reduce either to something very much like "mental pictures," which fail as theories of representation for a host of well-known reasons, or to "mental propositions," which are most amenable to the traditional models of cognition that Lakoff most strongly opposed.