Talk:Category mistake

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"It was alleged to be 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." What in the world does this mean? Could someone explain this in plain English please? Also, avoid passive voice.

I think this is saying that it's meaningless to apply the predicates that would apply to a substance to a collection of dispositions and capacities. If the mind just is a set of dispositions and capacities, then different predicates would apply to it than if it were an immaterial substance. I'd change the wording, except it attributes a position to Ryle that he probably didn't hold, so if I knew how, I'd just rewrite it to reflect what Ryle actually thought.JustinBlank (talk) 03:05, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Making a "category mistakes" can also be said about other areas of life.

I could've sworn the term was "category error."Shaggorama 01:41, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

I've certainly heard "category error" far more often than "category mistake". Change it? Artichoke84 18:39, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Ryle's 1949 paper "The Problem of Mind" (the origin of the term) refers to this subject as "category mistake." Hence the entry name should remain the same. I can't find an online copy of the paper, but you may consider:

http://www.philosophyprofessor.com/philosophies/category-mistake.php

Also, the article contained an erroneously overbroad definition of category error:

"In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means." Suggested here.

I have removed this because (a) I can find no other source for the definition of the term, (b) the web site cited is a fictional story with many factual errors and cannot be considered an authoritative source, and (c) the definition given is quite imprecise, a quality that is rarely found in definitions written by logicians and much more frequently found in definitions written by amateurs.

For these reasons, it seems safe to say that the definition provided is an error by Dan Simmons which should not be replicated in Wikipedia. User:JoomTory

I have removed this portion because the Chinese Room argument contains no explicit reference to any category mistakes, as the issue has to do with syntax and semantics as well as belief and content, and not reification or other ontological fallacy.

[edit] Chomsky Reference is Unmerited

Why is "Colorless Green..." mentioned under "See Also"? Chomsky used that phrase when arguing for the generativity of language. Its only connection to category mistakes is that it is a nonsensical phrase, and even then, many phrases exemplifying category mistakes need not to be totally unintelligible. So really there is no connection.

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7249.html http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/categories/

Agondie 13:14, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

See e.g. [1]. --Tgr 14:21, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
You haven't responded to my argument. If my argument is wrong, show me that it is wrong. Just because some guy uses it that way doesn't mean it's right, right? If, on the other hand, my argument is right, then it doesn't matter who uses it that way, does it? Agondie 06:46, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Agondie----I'm the one who originally added the Chomsky reference. It does have a connection to category mistakes, other than the fact that it's nonsensical. The connection is that Chomsky's sentence contains category mistakes. I'm using the definition of "category mistake" that's given in this wikipedia article: "a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property." For example, Chomsky's sentence ascribes the property "green" to the word "ideas," but ideas cannot have the property of being green. Yes, it's true that the sentence was constructed when arguing for the generativity of language. Chomsky was saying that this sentence is grammatically correct but unlikely to be generated. I would say that part of the reason that it's unlikely to be generated is because it contains category mistakes.
Navigatr85 01:15, 4 July 2007 (UTC)