eoccupiessand (ii) there is no meaningful sentence that contains that predicate in
which an expression not co-categorial witheoccupiess.
In Ryle’s“Categories,”which is reprinted in Ryle (1971), Ryle claims that category
mistakes are absurd sentences—sentences that lack both meanings and truth-
values—that result from conjoining expressions from different“logical”types. My
hypothesis is that for Ryle around the time ofThe Concept of Mind, the various
logical types are correlated with the senses of“there is,”“exists,”and“being”that
Ryle believes in. We can think of aRylean categoryas amaximalset of co-categorial
terms.“Red is sleeping”commits a category mistake because“red”and“is sleeping”
belong to incompatible logical types; moreover, the sense of “exists”associated
with“red”is a different sense of“exists”than that associated with“is sleeping.”
This suggests that a putative atomic sentence is actually a category mistake when
it consists of noun-phrases and predicates that are not co-categorial (or not
co-categorial with respect to a slot). A putative molecular sentence is actually a
category mistake when it contains an atomic category mistake.
As just noted, on Ryle’s (1971: 179) view, category mistakes are literally meaning-
less sentences.^48 Category mistakes do seem worse than merely false. Consider the
difference between the following claims:“The number two is blue”and“That cat is
canine.”Both are admittedly odd, perhaps even absurd, but many have the intuition
that thefirst is far worse than the second. If Ryle is right, the difference is that
category mistakes are worse than being false by virtue of being nonsensical.
I don’t think that category mistakes are meaningless sentences.^49 As I have stressed
in section 2.2, the view that there are modes of being, i.e., manypossibleperfectly
natural senses of“exists,”is consistent with the claim that, in English, the word
“exists”is univocal. In fact, I suspect that“exists”is univocal in English, and so
(in English) every term is“co-categorial.”^50 Sentences like“The number two is blue”
and“That man is an abstract object”are meaningful, although obviously false and
bizarre. So my explanation of why such sentences are worse than false must be
different than Ryle’s.
Magidor (2013: 14) notes that typically those who think that category mistakes are
meaningless think that the notion of a category mistake is of crucial importance to
philosophy of mind or metaphysics more broadly, whereas those who think they
are meaningful but false typically dismiss the importance of category mistakes.
We’ll consider a middle path: category mistakes in English are meaningful (yet
false) but our reaction to them indicates something important about the underlying
metaphysical situation. Ryle is wrong about English, but a Rylean view about the
(^48) Magidor (2013: 10, fn. 24) notes that sometimes Ryle appears to think of category mistakes as being
false. But this strikes me as mere appearance. 49
50 Magidor (2013) makes a persuasive defense of the meaningfulness of category mistakes.
Quine (1976: 229) defends this. This is also the view of Magidor (2013). Van Inwagen (2014: 65–6)
also presents strong evidence that“exists”is a univocal English word.