One significant lesson from Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is that language doesn't carve up reality "at the joints." In other words, human categories don't line up exactly with things as they are, which are changed upon the blue guitar (hence the title of Lakoff's book.) The imagination creates its own reality, and in fact there is no literal thought; there can be no abstraction without metaphor and metonymy. This sort of linguistic relativism is by no means incompatible with "basic realism." In other words, realty exists. In fact, we have to learn to distinguish categories that do correspond in a meaningful sense to things as they are and those that are based on metaphors that we might easily question. For example, if we use the metaphor "time is a resource," then we can talk about stealing time, spending time, wasting time, using and investing time. But it is easy to imagine a culture that didn't view time metaphorically as a valuable resource, in which this metaphor consequently had no traction at all. Another insight: "folk" theories of reference can enter into conflict with one another. Language is a not a mirro of nature.

I think we already "know" all this from Borges, from Stevens, from Levi-Strauss, just as we know about the "embodiment of knowledge" from William Carlos Williams's book of the same title. No wonder Lakoff was an early defender of Language Poetry, through his friendship with Barrett Watten. Lakoff in fact wrote an article that was then countered by Tom Clark's famous "Stalinist as Linguist" tirade.