ABSTRACT
Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. In a book entitled Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, George Lakoff cites the late philosopher of science, Stephen Jay Gould’s discussion of the difficulties in settling on how best to classify that animal commonly known as a ‘zebra’. Biologists generally classify living things either cladistically or phenetically. Perhaps, Lakoff says, the folk view that sees classification to be based in a singular correspondence between name and identity—an approach that assumes that zebras really are just one thing and thus that there is some definitive classification system capable of expressing it, if we could only find it—is itself the problem.
