A category mistake is a semantic or ontological error by which a property (or some category of being) is incorrectly ascribed to a particular ontological type or token in a proposition and therefore is meaningless or nonsense. For example, the statement "the business of the book sleeps eternally" is syntactically correct, but it is meaningless or nonsense because it incorrectly ascribes the property, sleeps eternally, to business, and incorrectly ascribes the property, business, to the token, the book.
The term category mistake was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his definitive work The Concept of Mind to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind born from Cartesian metaphysics. 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.
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A categorymistake, or category error is a semantic or ontological error by which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property.
The term "categorymistake" was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind born from Cartesian metaphysics.
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.
Categorymistakes such as the ones in Ryle’s example are made by people who do not know how to properly wield the concepts with which they are working.
The theoretically interesting categorymistakes are those made by people who are perfectly competent to apply concepts, at least in the situations with which they are familiar, but are still liable in their abstract thinking to relocate those concepts to logical types to which they do not belong.
So they belong, in accordance with the concept of category, to the same logical types, given that the expressions that are used for the descriptions of mental events are always mere negatives of the expressions used for the descriptions of material events.
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