category-mistakes

Gilbert Ryle coined the term category-mistake to refer to the misunderstandings that arise from not recognizing the different reference-frames often required to communicate different concepts. He used the following story as a simple illustration:

A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. "But where is the University? .." he then asks. It has to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen.

Category-mistakes result from literalism, and are not merely an academic issue. Fifty years before Ryle, Heinrich Hertz wrote about their impact on science.

With the terms 'velocity and 'gold' we connect a large number of relations to other terms; and between all these relations we find no contradictions which offend us. We are therefore satisfied and ask no further questions. But we have accumulated around the terms "force" and "electricity" more relations than can be completely reconciled amongst themselves. We have an obscure feeling of this and want to have things cleared up. Our confused wish finds expression in the confused question as to the nature of force and electricity. But the answer which we want is not really an answer to this question. It is not by finding out more and fresh relations and connections that it can be answered; but by removing the contradictions existing between those already known, and thus perhaps by reducing their number. When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.

Scriptural dogmas are the earliest examples of category-mistakes. Perhaps the greatest of these is the conflation of the body and the soul; and this remains today, reframed in scientism, despite its simple and succinct refutation by Aristotle over two thousand years ago.

.. we can wholly dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and the body are one: it is as meaningless as to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one - or generally the matter of a thing and that of which it is the matter. Unity has many senses (as many as 'is' has), but the most proper and fundamental sense of both is the relation of an actuality to that of which it is the actuality.