Category Mistakes (SEP)

Category mistakes are sentences such as ‘The number two is blue’, ‘The theory of relativity is eating breakfast’, or ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’. Such sentences are striking in that they are highly odd or infelicitous, and moreover infelicitous in a distinctive sort of way. For example, they seem to be infelicitous in a different way to merely trivially false sentences such as ‘2+2=5
’ or obviously ungrammatical strings such as ‘The ran this’.

The majority of contemporary discussions of the topic are devoted to explaining what makes category mistakes infelicitous, and a wide variety of accounts have been proposed including syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic explanations. Indeed, this is part of what makes category mistakes a particularly important topic: a theory of what makes category mistakes unacceptable can potentially shape our theories of syntax, semantics, or pragmatics and the boundaries between them. As Camp (2016, 611–612) explains: “Category mistakes … are theoretically interesting precisely because they are marginal: as by-products of our linguistic and conceptual systems lacking any obvious function, they reveal the limits of, and interactions among, those systems. Do syntactic or semantic restrictions block ‘is green’ from taking ‘Two’ as a subject? Does the compositional machinery proceed smoothly, but fail to generate a coherent proposition or delimit a coherent possibility? Or is the proposition it produces simply one that our paltry minds cannot grasp, or that fails to arouse our interest? One’s answers to these questions depend on, and constrain, one’s conceptions of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, of language and thought, and of the relations among them and between them and the world.”

Moreover, the question of how to account for the infelicity of category mistakes has implications for a variety of other philosophical questions. For example, in metaphysics, it is often argued that a statue must be distinct from the lump of clay from which it is made because ‘The statue is Romanesque’ is true, while ‘The lump of clay is Romanesque’ is not—indeed, the latter ascription arguably constitutes a category mistake. Correspondingly, an assessment of this argument depends on one’s account of category mistakes (see §4.3 below).

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-mistakes/

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Chatbot

A category mistake (or category error) occurs when something is assigned to a logical category to which it does not belong. The term was introduced by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949).

The mistake arises when one treats something as if it were the same type of thing as others in a group, even though it operates on a completely different logical level.

Ryle’s classic example involves a visitor to a university. After being shown the library, laboratories, and lecture halls, the visitor asks: “But where is the university?” The error is assuming the university is another building alongside the others. In reality, the university is the institution constituted by those buildings and activities, not an additional object.

Another example: saying “the mind is another thing inside the body” can be seen as a category mistake. According to Ryle, mental terms describe ways people behave or think, not a separate object like an organ.

Typical structure of a category mistake:

• A concept belongs to one logical type.

• It is treated as if it belongs to another type.

• The resulting statement looks meaningful but is conceptually confused.

Examples:

• Asking “What color is the number seven?” (numbers are not physical objects).

• Saying “Democracy weighs five kilograms.” (political systems do not have weight).

In philosophy, category mistakes are important because they often reveal conceptual confusion, especially in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Ryle used the idea primarily to criticize Cartesian dualism, the view that mind and body are two separate kinds of substance.

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Wikipedia

A category mistake (or category error, categorical mistake, or mistake of category) is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. An example is a person learning that the game of cricket involves team spirit, and after being given a demonstration of each player’s role, asking which player performs the “team spirit”.

History
Al Martinich claims that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the first to discuss a propensity among philosophers to mistakenly combine words taken from different and incompatible categories.

The term “category-mistake” was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind (1949) to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind born from Cartesian metaphysics. Ryle argues that it is a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance because predications of substance are not meaningful for a collection of dispositions and capacities.

The phrase is introduced in the first chapter. The first example is of a visitor to Oxford. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquires “But where is the University?” The visitor’s mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category “units of physical infrastructure”, rather than that of an “institution”. In his second example, a child witnesses the march-past of a division of soldiers. After having had battalions, batteries, squadrons, etc. pointed out, the child asks when the division is going to appear. He is told that “the march-past was not a parade of battalions, batteries, squadrons and a division; it was a parade of the battalions, batteries and squadrons of a division” (Ryle’s italics). His third example is of a foreigner being shown a cricket match. After being pointed out batsmen, bowlers and fielders, the foreigner asks: “who is left to contribute the famous element of team-spirit?” He goes on to argue that the Cartesian dualism of mind and body rests on a category mistake.[page needed

Massimo Pigliucci, Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, argues that the “hard problem of consciousness”, as expressed by David Chalmers and others, rests on a category mistake, in that explaining “experience” is being incorrectly treated as different from explaining the underlying biological processes which generate experience.