George Lakoff: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, from the first chapter: “Categories are categories of things. Since we understand the world not only in terms of individual things but also in terms of categories of things, we tend to attribute a real existence to those categories. We have categories for biological species, physical substances, artifacts, colors, kinsmen, and emotions and even categories of sentences, words, and meanings. We have categories for everything we can think about.” (Via Jonas Söderström, in a comment thread at Gustav Holmberg’s weblog.)