Philosophy matters…

Philosophy matters. It matters more than most people realize, because philosophical ideas that have developed over the centuries enter our culture in the form of a world view and affect us in thousands of ways. Philosophy matters in the academic world because the conceptual frameworks upon which entire academic disciplines rest usually have roots in philosophy—roots so deep and invisible that they are usually not even noticed. This is certainly true in my own field, linguistics, where the classical theory of categories and certain attendant philosophical assumptions have been taken so much for granted that alternative assumptions seem unthinkable. One of my purposes is to show that the classical theory of categories is inadequate for the study of natural language as well as other aspects of the mind and that new philosophical assumptions are required in order to make sense of linguistic phenomena and other aspects of cognition.—George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 157