Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

Reading about categorization and the points raised about the need to reevaluate our methods for putting things into categories was thought provoking. As Lakoff says, "In moving about the world, we automatically categoriza people, animals, and physical objects...this someitmes leads to the impression that we just categorize things as they are, that things come in natural kinds" (6). This statement is true, as I find myself coming to that same conclusion, that things in the world come in natural kinds. What is crazy is that until recently, we had thought that we had a good grasp on how we categorize the world and understanding in why we do it as such. How we classified and categorized things comes from the tradition of doing it this way, from the times of Aristotle. "This classical theory was not the result of empirical study. It was not even a subject of major debate. Over the centuries it simply became part of the background assumptions taken for granted in most scholarly disciplines" (6 Lakoff). It is only recently that we have started to question our reasoning for following in this way.
     Recent questions have been raised that make categorization an issue. For example, Eleanor Rosch focused on two implications of the classical theory: If categories are defined only by properties that it's members share, then no single member should be better examples of the category than any others in the category. Also, if categories are only defined by properties inherent in the members, then they should be independent of the peculiarities of any beings doing the categorizing (7 Lakoff). During studies, Rosch observed that categories, in general, ave best examples (called "prototypes") and that human capacities play a role in categorizations. Lakoff goes on to discuss how we use categorization in every area of reasoning, in which it plays a crucial role. "The view of reason as the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols comes with an implicitly theory of categorization" (8 Lakoff).
     Interesting to think how important this aspect of categorization is, even if we sometimes are doing it at a subconscious level. A few more things that Lakoff brings to mind, "Category symbols can get their meaning only through a capacity to correspond to categories in the world (the real world or some possible world. To accomplish this, categories must be seen as existing in the world independent of people and defined only by the characteristics of their members and not in terms of any characteristics of the human" (8). This is again pointing out that humans own understanding and ability to reason become their own bias when putting things into categories, whether they are aware of them or not. This is one of the reasons that a new method is needed that can get around these biases of the humans making the categorization. To cut to the end of the matter, I loved this quote from Lakoff, "To change the concept of category itself is to change our understanding of the world" (9). I thought that really brings the reality of what changing our means of categorizing our world could result in.
    This reading was another interesting one, although I had to go back and read it a few times to get a better understanding of it, and even now find some of those areas a bit over my line of thinking. I find that I find the need to rethink how we as humans, categorize things to be an interesting debate and would be interested to see what alternative methods could work and if they could be brought to the forefront of scholarly thinking.