[extropy-chat] On categories and classification

[Amara Graps]

Body- A Categorization With Which We Are All Familiar...

In George Lakoff's book: _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things:
What Categories Reveal About the Mind_,
he states that _bodily experience_ adds to the basic-level of
categorization:

\begin{quote} (pg. 302)
"The existence of directly meaningful concepts -- basic-level
concepts and image schemas -- provides certain fixed points in the
objective evaluation of situations. The image-schematic structure of
bodily experience is, we hypothesize, the same for all human beings.
[...] The consideration of certain gross patterns in our experience
-- our vertical orientation, the nature of our bodies as containers,
our ability to sense hot and cold, our experience of being empty as
opposed to filled, etc. suggests that our experiences is structured
kinesthetically in at least a gross way in a variety of experiential
domains.

Cognitive models derive their fundamental meaningfulness directly
from their ability to match up with preconceptual structure. Such
direct matchings provide a basis for an account of truth and
knowledge. Because such matching is "internal" to a person, the
irreconcilable problems in the objectivist theories do not arise in
experientialist theories.

In domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual
structure to our experience, we import such structure via metaphor.
Metaphor provides us with a means for comprehending domains of
experience that do not not have a preconceptual structure of their
own. A great many of our domains of experience are like this.
Comprehending experience via metaphor is one of the great
imaginative triumphs of the human mind. Much of rational thought
involves the use of metaphoric models. Any adequate account of
rationality must account for the use of imagination and much of
imaginations consists of metaphorical reasoning."
\end{quote}

And a quote regarding Metaphor:

"Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by
substituting something more familiar to use. We say we understand an
aspect of nature when we can say it is similar to some familiar
theoretical model."
(Julian Jaynes in _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
the Bicameral Mind_, pg. 52, 53)

Amara

P.S. According to Lee Daniel Crocker:

''Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things" had a lot of
good ideas, but I'd read it with a grain of Modafinil, not
salt: he has the annoying tendency to go on and on for 20
pages on some small point that should be obvious to most of
us already.  Steve Pinker covers more or less the same
material, and he can write.''

-- 

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Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
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"My, this game does teach new words!" --Hobbes