Lakoff and categories
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
7:45 AM
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.
Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Summary Some topics
I think this is a pretty interesting book, a sort of
compendium of categories. I think that Lakoff plays a
little fast and loose with some of the research he cites,
but there are a lot of interesting ideas here, especially
for designers working with classification (which is
pretty much every designer).
What is cognitive science? Lakoff's version asks the
following questions (Lakoff 1987: xi):
○ What is reason?
○ How do we make sense of our experience?
○ What is a conceptual system and how is it
organized?
○ Do all people use the same conceptual system?
○ If so, what is that system?
○ If not, exactly what is there that is common to
the way all human beings think?
Lakoff summarizes the first 150 pages of his book on
pg. 153:
○ The structure of thought is characterized by
cognitive models.
○ Categories of mind correspond to elements in
those models.
○ Some cognitive models are scalar. They yield
categories with degrees of membership. These
are the source of some prototype effects.
○ Some cognitive models are classical; that is, they
have rigid boundaries and are defined by
necessary and sufficient conditions. They can be
the source of prototype effects when their
background conditions are partly consistent
with our knowledge about certain given entities.
○ Some cognitive models are metonymic, in that
they allow a part of a category (a member or
subcategory) to stand for the category as a whole
for some purpose, usually reasoning. They too
can be sources of prototype effects.
○ The most radical prototype phenomena are
radial categories. They cannot be represented by
single model plus general principles. They
involve many models organized around a center,
with links to the center.
(This list continues, but I'm not going to type it all up
here.)
Classical categories
"Categories on the traditional view are characterized
solely by the properties shared by their members"
(Lakoff 1987: xi).
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Some themes Lakoff discusses (Lakoff 1987: 12):
○ Family resemblances: not all members have to
have any particular properties in common to
define a category. Games, for example. Chess
and go both involve competition, skill and the
use of long-term strategies. Chess and poker
both involve competition. Poker and old maid
are both card games. (Lakoff 1987: 16).
○ Centrality: Some members are better examples
than others. Any definition of numbers has to
include the integers, but you don't necessarily
have to include transfinite numbers. There are
dozens of different types of mothers who are
named, but not all of them (birth mother,
adoptive mother, etc, but nothing for
transsexuals who gave birth but are now men).
○ Polysemy as categorization
○ Generativity as a prototype phenomenon
○ Membership gradience: At least some
categories have degrees of membership and no
clear boundaries.
○ Centrality gradience: Members can be in
categories boundaries, but they can be more or
less central.
○ Conceptual embodiment
○ Functional embodiment
○ Basic-level categorization: See also Rosch 1976
or Lakoff 1987: 46 for characterizations of basic
levels. "Our knowledge at the basic level is
mainly organized around part-whole divisions"
(Lakoff 1987: 47). Parts are functions, they
determine shapes, they're what we interact with.
○ Basic-level primacy
○ Reference-point, or 'metonymic,' reasoning:
Part of a category can stand for the whole
category in certain reasoning processes.
○ Paragons are not averages, but they are ideals
or the opposite. Babe Ruth, Cadillac. Of course
paragons in a field are not paragons as human
beings (though this surprises us every time a
scandal breaks).
○ Chaining can put things in the same category
even though you can pluck up two items and
not see any relevant shared properties (see also
Lakoff 1987: 109).
Essentialism says that things have properties that
make them the kind of thing they are. Other
properties are accidental and just happen to be there.
Framing and commensurability: Two conceptual
(Lakoff 1987: xi). Framing and commensurability: Two conceptual
systems are commensurable if they frame situations in
"The traditional account claims that the capacity for the same way and if there is a one-one
meaningful thought and for reason is abstract and not correspondence between concepts in the two systems,
necessarily embodied in any organism. Thus, frame by frame.
meaningful concepts and rationality are
transcendental, in the sense that they transcend, or go References
beyond, the physical limitations of any organism" Barsalou (1983, 1984). Look at his work on ad hoc
(Lakoff 1987: xi). categories like "things to take from one's home during
a fire".
Modern attempts to make objectivism work "assume
that rational thought consists of the manipulation of Berlin, B. On plant and animal naming (embodiment
abstract symbols and that these symbols get their determines some of the most significant properties of
meaning via a correspondence with the world, human categories).
objectively construed, that is, independent of the
understanding of any organism. A collection of Brown, R. (1958). "How Shall a Thing Be Called?" For a
symbols placed in correspondence with an objectively first look at basic-level categories.
structured world is viewed as a representation of
reality. On the objectivist view, all rational thought Cain, A. (1958). "Logic and Memory in Linnaeus's
involves the manipulation of abstract symbols which System of Taxonomy." Which looks at the fact that
are given meaning only via conventional the heart of the system is genus, not species. The
correspondences with things in the external world" genus gives general characteristics.
(Lakoff 1987: xii).
Dubois, D. and H. Prade. (1980). Fuzzy Sets and
"All conceptual categories must be symbols (or Systems: Theory and Applications. New York:
symbolic structures) that can designate categories in Academic Press.
the real world, or in some possible world. And the
world must come divided up into categories of the Fauconnier (1985) on referential opacity,
right kind so that symbols and symbolic structures can presupposition and other mental space phenomenon.
refer to them" (Lakoff 1987: xiv).
Haiman, J. (1980). "The Iconicity of Grammar:
"Thought has gestalt properties and is thus not Isomorphism and Motivation." Language 56, no. 3, pp.
atomistic; concepts have an overall structure that goes 515-540.
beyond merely putting together conceptual 'building
blocks' by general rules" (Lakoff 1987: xiv). Kempton, W. (1981). The Folk Classification of
Ceramics: A Study of Cognitive Prototypes. New York:
"Categorization is not a matter to be taken lightly. Academic Press.
There is nothing more basic than categorization to our
thought, perception, action, and speech. Every time Labov, W. (1973). "The Boundaries of Words and
we see something as a kind of thing, for example, a Their Meanings." In J. Fishman (Ed.), New Ways of
tree, we are categorizing. Whenever we reason about Analyzing Variation in English, pp. 340-373.
kinds of things--chairs, nations, illnesses, emotions, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
any kind of thing at all--we are employing
categories…Without the ability to categorize, we could Rips (1975) shows that people use typical category
not function at all, either in the physical world or in members to reason. Typical category members are
our social and intellectual lives" (Lakoff 1987: 5-6). unconscious and automatic, they don't really change
in a lifetime, they aren't discussed publically.
"Most categorization is automatic and unconscious,
and if we become aware of it at all, it is only in Rosch, E. Creating experimental paradigms for
problematic cases" (Lakoff 1987: 6). determining subjects' ratings of how good an example
of a category a member is judged to be.
The predicate calculus view of science "characterizes
explanations only in terms of deductions from Ross, J. (1981). Shows that toe is nounier than breath,
hypotheses, or correspondingly, in terms of which is nounier than way, which is nounier than
computations. Such a methodology not only claims to time. (Lakoff 1987: 63 has some of this.)
be rigorous in itself, it also claims that no other
approach can be sufficiently precise to be called Open questions
scientific" (Lakoff 1987: 10). But see Kuhn, for example, I'm not quite sure what to do with Rosch here. The
reasons why this isn't true. general point is that prototype effects don't directly
mirror category structure or constitute
"On the objectivist view, reality comes with a unique,

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"On the objectivist view, reality comes with a unique,
correct, complete structure in terms of entities,
properties, and relations. This structure exists,
independent of any human understanding" (Lakoff
1987: 159).
Problems with classical categories
"If categories are defined only by properties that all
members share, then no members should be better
examples of the category than any other members"
(Lakoff 1987: 7).
"If categories are defined only by properties inherent
in the members, then categories should be
independent of the peculiarities of any beings doing
the categorizing" (Lakoff 1987: 7).
Since owls, penguins, and parrots are all 100% birds,
we can't use this example to show fuzzy boundaries,
but we can use it to show internal structure of a
category. (Lakoff 1987: 45).
For some general problems in logic and Barwise
principles of veridicality and substitution, see Lakoff
1987: 128. They don't work because objectivism
requires something to always hold.
Usually logicians say that there is no apple that isn't
an apple. But a carved wooden apple might be
considered an apple that is not an apple. A cross
between a pear and an apple might be something that
is a fruit but is not an apple and is not not-an-apple.
(Lakoff 1987: 141).
Rosch's basic-level results suggest (from Lakoff 1987:
146):
○ There are basic-level concepts, but they aren't
atomic concepts.
○ Meaning is based on human perception,
interaction, and understanding, and is therefore
not truth conditional.
More specifically, "the criterion of getting the truth
conditions right in sentence-by-sentence translation
ignores what is in the mind. It ignores how sentences
are understood. And it ignores how concepts are
organized, both internally and relative to one another"
(Lakoff 1987: 316).
Linguistics
The most fundamental assumption of Chomsky's
theory of language is that grammar is separate from
cognition. It's required because of the idea that
language is a formal system.
For discussion of basic clause types and prototype
effects in syntax, see Lakoff 1987: 66-67. "We have no abstract mental images of furniture that
are not images of basic-level objects like chairs, tables,
"A cognitive model may function to allow a salient beds, etc. Try to imagine a piece of furniture that
example to stand metonymically for a whole category. doesn't look like a chair, or tale, or bed, etc. but is
In such cases, our probability judgments about the
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mirror category structure or constitute
representations of categories, but I think there's some
subtlety that I'm missing:
The pervasiveness of prototypes in real-world
categories and of prototypicality as a variable
indicates that prototypes must have some place
in psychological theories of representation,
processing, and learning. However, prototypes
themselves do not constitute any particular
model of process, representations, or learning.
(Rosch 1978: 40 qtd. in Lakoff 1987: 44).
Is it right to lump Minsky's frames (1975), Schank and
Abelson's scripts (1977) and Rumelhart's schemas
(1975) with Fillmore's frames (1968?)? There are a
number of arguments against some of these models in
the HCI world, I need to check up on them. Lakoff
likes them for giving network structures with labeled
branches that can code propositional information. He
doesn't like them because they can't handle effects of
metonymy. They have nothing imaginative and have a
single representation for each category (so no radial
structures). (See Lakoff 1987: 116-117).
I'm curious about how Montague semantics handle
"small galaxy" and "good thief" cases.
How much variation is there across conceptual
systems? How deep is the variation? What is its
nature? (For other questions, see Lakoff 1987: 307.)
Experimental methods
Remember that you can do learning, matching,
memory, judgment tasks.
○ Direct ratings
○ Reaction times
○ Production of examples
○ Similarity (look for asymmetries)
Rosch (1977) developed tests to get at the relative
centrality of members in a category.
Fun
May want to talk about Lounsbury and Fox kinship
systems (Lakoff 1987: 22).
Ekman's basic emotions which correlate universally
with facial gestures (though I have heard that there
are solid refutations of this):
○ Happiness
○ Sadness
○ Anger
○ Fear
○ Surprise
○ Interest
 doesn't look like a chair, or tale, or bed, etc. but is
In such cases, our probability judgments about the more abstract. People seem not to be able to do so"
category are affected" (Lakoff 1987: 90). (Lakoff 1987: 52).

No analysis of a classifier system is complete until
you've distinguished unrelated homonyms from
related ones, says Lakoff (1987: 07). "The
generalizations concerning polysemy can only be
described and explained in terms of conceptual
organization. Thus, the study of linguistic phenomena
leads to hypotheses concerning conceptual
organization" (Lakoff 1987: 334).
Denny (1976) observes that cross-linguistically, there
are three basic semantic types for classifiers--all
having to do with interaction:
○ Physical interaction (handling)
○ Functional interaction (using an object as a
vehicle)
○ Social interaction--interacting appropriately
with a human compared to an animal or a high
status person compared to a low status one.
"Neutralization of contrasts": How tall is Harry doesn't
imply that Harry is tall, but How short is Harry
suggests that Harry is short. One member is neutral
(tall) and perhaps more basic (and "unmarked").
(Lakoff 1987: 60).
The Coleman-Kay study (1981) asked informants to
define a lie, "they consistently said it was a false
statement, even though falsity turned out consistently
to be the least important element by far in the cluster
of conditions…Falsity is the most informative of the
conditions in the idealized model, since falsity entails
both intent to deceive and lack of belief. It is thus
falsity that is the defining characteristic of a lie" (qt
from Lakoff 1987: 72-73, last second observation is
Sweetser 1984). More specifically, Sweeter shows that
weighted feature bundles don't provide enough
structure. (See also Lakoff 1987: 115.)

The Denny argument is that the range of physical "Consider an unwed mother who gives up her child
interaction classifiers correlates with the kinds of for adoption and then goes out and gets a job. She is
significant physical activities in the culture. still a mother…and she is working--but she is not a
working mother!" (Lakoff 1987: 80). Stereotypes are
The role of hedges (Esther Williams is a fish vs. Esther important for conceptual structure because they
Williams is a regular fish) undermines the objectivist define normal expectations and these are important in
view of the distinction between definitional and cognition since expectations are required to
incidental properties, which absolutely requires characterize the meanings of certain words.
semantics and pragmatics be kept separate. See Lakoff
1987: 138-139. Borges' taxonomy of the animal kingdom (Lakoff 1987:
92) is one of my favorites:
Sets are at the heart of all modern versions of classical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_
theory of categorization and formal semantics. This is Benevolent_Recognition.
true throughout generative linguistics. "A language,
within generative linguistics, is defined as a set of Examples of the counter hon happen in Lakoff 1987:
sentences, and a grammar as a set of rules that 104-109. I think Todd and Angella would get a kick out
characterizes the set of sentences…In virtually every of this section.
respect, generative linguistics rests on the classical
theory of categorization as it has been interpreted in Gould (1983) has a great discussion of "What, If
the Fregean tradition--the assumption that the Anything, Is a Zebra?" See quotes in Lakoff 1987: 119.
humanly relevant notion of a category can be But Lakoff asks a good question: "There are at least
adequately represented via a set-theoretical version of two kinds of taxonomic models available to
an objectivist theory of categories" (Lakoff 1987: traditional biologists: the cladistic and the phenetic.
180-181). Ideally, they are supposed to converge, and they do in
a great many cases, but by no means all…The force of
Generative linguistics insulates itself from empirical the folk theory of taxonomic models is so strong that
findings: "First, there is the performance-competence a choice must be made…Why?...There is nothing
distinction, which is sufficiently manipulable so that wrong with saying that there are just two different
almost any experimental result from psychology can, taxonomic models of life forms, which are concerned
at least initially, be claimed to be in the realm of mere with different and equally valid issues" (Lakoff 1987:
performance and thus can be ignored…Second, 121).
generative grammar is defined so as to be independent
of general cognitive capabilities. Consequently, any The discussion of technically and strictly speaking
demonstration that classical categorization is (from Kay 1983) is pretty fun (Lakoff 1987: 123-125).
inadequate for general cognition will be irrelevant in ○ Technically, Richard Nixon is a Quaker.
generative linguistics" (For more of this, see Lakoff ○ Strictly speaking, Richard Nixon is a Quaker.
1987: 181). ○ Technically, Ronald Reagan is a rancher.
○ Strictly speaking, Ronald Reagan is a rancher.
"The paradigm in which generative linguistics is

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 Strictly speaking, Ronald Reagan is a rancher.
"The paradigm in which generative linguistics is
defined absolutely requires a strong assumption of the Though presupposition was killed off in linguistics by
autonomy of syntax from semantics and of the the mid-1970s, it is still pretty fun. See Lakoff 1987: 131-
language faculty from any external cognitive 134. See also Horn 1985.
influence" (Lakoff 1987: 182). This idea "derives from
the attempt to impose the structure of mathematical One of the classic compound examples is Downing
logic on the study of human language and human (1977): Please sit in the apple juice seat.
thought in general. In mathematical logic, there are an
independently existing 'syntax,' independently Quinn (in press when Lakoff was writing in 1987)
existing model structures, and principles for mapping demonstrates how different conceptualizations of
the syntax into the model structures. The 'semantics' marriage on the part of spouses in a marriage affect
consists of the model structure plus the mapping behavior and lead to misunderstanding and marital
principles. It is a consequence of the definition of this difficulties.
kind of system that the syntax exists independent of
the semantics, but not vice versa" (Lakoff 1987: 225). Relevant to design
But "formalist 'syntax' and 'semantics' in the tradition For software developers: There are two kinds of
of mathematical logic are artificial constructions nonuniversality and one of them is "due to special
invented to serve certain mathematical purposes. training, limited to subpopulations of experts who
They are not about natural language syntax and may treat a slightly more specific level as basic in
human reason" (Lakoff 1987: 227). some domains of expertise" (From Berlin, Lakoff 1987:
37).
"The primary function of language is to convey
meaning. A grammar should therefore show as The relevant notion of a property is not something
directly as possible how parameters of form are linked objective and independent in the world, but
to parameters of meaning" (Lakoff 1987: 583). something international. "The result of our
interactions as part of our physical and cultural
"Since meaning and communicative function are environments given our bodies and our cognitive
primary, grammars should attempt to explain as much apparatus. Such interactional properties form clusters
as possible about parameters of form on the basis of in our experience, and prototype and basic-level
parameters of meaning and communicative function" structure can reflect such clusterings" (Lakoff 1987:
(Lakoff 1987: 583). 51).

See also "prototypical causation" discussions on Lakoff

1987: 54-55. These suggest to me good reasons that
software fails--direct manipulation is often NOT the
cause of things that happen. It is hard for users to
construct accurate representations of causality.

From Dixon 1982: "If there is a basic domain of

experience associated with A, then it is natural for
entities in that domain to be in the same category as
A" (qtd in Lakoff 1987: 93). For Dyribal: "Trees,
bushes, vines, and grasses with no edible parts are in
class IV. But two stinging trees and a stinging nettle
vine are in class II with harmful things. Hawks might
be expected to be in class II with other birds, but since
they are harmful, their harmfulness is marked by
placing them in another category--class I" (Lakoff
1987: 95).

"Human beings do not function with internally

consistent, monolithic conceptual systems. Each of us
has many ways of making sense of experience,
especially of those domains of experience that do not
come with a clearly delineated preconceptual
structure of their own, such as the domains of
emotion and thought" (Lakoff 1987: 305).

"One must learn the right way to conceptualize the

problem. Each such conceptualization is a way of
comprehending the domain. A physicist has to have

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 comprehending the domain. A physicist has to have
many ways of conceptualizing force, and he has to
know which one to use in which physical domain.
There is no single correct way to conceptualize force
that will work for all physical domains" (Lakoff 1987:
306).

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