Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

About “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things”

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is a 1987 non-fiction book by George Lakoff, an American cognitive linguist. Published by the University of Chicago Press, the book presents a model of cognition based on semantics. It focuses on the role of metaphor—defined as the mapping of cognitive structures from one domain to another—in the cognitive process. The book examines how cognitive metaphors, both culturally specific and human-universal, affect the grammar of several languages. It also challenges the classical logical-positivist or Anglo-American School philosophical concept of the category, which is often used to explain the scientific method. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.)