Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind

        In Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, author George Lakoff begins by describing what a category is and how all the different things that dominate our lives are assorted into categories. "...things are categorized together on the basis of what they have in common" (pg. 5). I liked this quote because of how true it is. Everything that humans categorized is by similarity and I thought it was interesting how things are never classified by how they differ. The newest theory of categorization shows that the way humans categorize is based on their principles. One things that Lakoff said that I thought was really interesting was when he said, "Without the ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual lives" (pg. 6). I never thought about the ability to categorize as a vitality of life. I believe that humans do not need to categorize to function, but I also believe that having this ability allows humans to be exactly that, human. As the properties that these categories have become the defining factor of that category it has become easier for the coding of computer software to take over this ability to categorize. I feel like this isn't anything new. For years, since the computer and the internet were invented, the computer has slowly been taking over multiple jobs that were originally done by humans. I never thought about categorization and categorization methods as something that needed this much discussion, but Lakoff definitely seems to think so. I think it is an interesting topic that forces the reader to see things in a whole new light.