Descartes thought that the overwhelming vast majority of fallacies were informal, or confusions of meaning, and not logical.

What's interesting to me is that this is both the birth place of the fantastic in the creative sense, and the confusion sense. It is the room within grammar for misunderstanding, or for misinterpretation that grants this play, which can be both great, and disastrous.

It is comical to misunderstand things in creative ways, as well as can a whole myth be forged from this creative misinterpretation, but it requires moving beyond the understanding, which is the ground, and sense-making foundation of the myth. The trick is, that we're delivered the myth, or fantastic, and need to backwards engineer things back to the mundane. This is how we get the joke, how we appreciate the myth.

More and more, I'm convinced that perhaps the most important skill in philosophy involves the diagnosis of category errors: errors in which there is a confusion of kinds. For example, one might ask, 'what color are ideas?'. Assuming no clever play on words or metaphorical flourish, this is, prima facie, a nonsense question. — StreetlightX

Not to someone with synaesthesia.

And are you not making yourself guilty of the very thing you're talking about? For some, asking the question: "What is the meaning of life?" is a coarse grained way of asking a question which is relevant to them on a practical level where the underlying axioms are taken to be self evident. I would agree that such should be made clear in asking such a question, a personally sufficient answer should not be used to make fundamental metaphysical claims. It's a bit much to make every question into an epistemological debate though.

You have a point and maybe a desire to seek wisdom vs a desire to seek out "technical" philosophy has become a category error which is becoming more and more evident due to the accessibility of forums like these.

In writing at least, the one reference Deleuze ever made to Wittgenstein was in fact to "the disciples of Wittgenstein" (who "spread their misty confusion, their sufficiency and their terror"), rather than directly to Witty himself. And in the taped abecedaire interview - the only other place I know where he mentions Wittgenstein - it's again to 'Wittgensteinians' in the plural (who are, incidentally, 'assassins of philosophy'). I've always wondered if, given the continual use of the plural, it was to the Vienna circle and the logical positivists to which Deleuze's ire is directed at, moreso than Witty himself - or at least a Witty amalgamated to such views. Which I think kind of makes sense given that at this time, this was the predominant reception of Witty's work.

And I should say that I don't think that the OP would quite stand for Witty's conception of philosophy. I think Witty understood philosophy as such to be an archive of category mistakes from beginning to end, without really finding it in a positive, autonomous enterprise unto itself. On this, I think Witty was wrong. Or, he was right about everything save the 'application' of his critique to philosophy as a whole.

Not to someone with synaesthesia. — Gooseone

Hah, I was waiting for the synaesthesia response. But then, one has provided a context by which one could make sense of such a question. And part of my point was that is just what is needed: sense-making can be understood as simply another way of saying 'context-providing': of showing how a difference makes a difference, of elaborating the stakes behind any one question.

For some, asking the question: "What is the meaning of life?" is a coarse grained way of asking a question which is relevant to them on a practical level where the underlying axioms are taken to be self evident. — Gooseone

And I think this is fine, as far as it goes, but I wouldn't confuse this with the work of philosophy.

I note that both the examples in the OP yield nicely to Russellian analysis. He would deconstruct the first one as:

1. (Claim) There exists a unique c such that c is a colour and Forall x, forall y, if x and y are both ideas then there c is the colour of x and c is the colour of y,
2. (Question) Find c.

and the second one as

1. (Claim) There exists a unique m such that m is the meaning of Life.
2. (Question) Find m.

In Russell's terms these are both 'definite descriptions', which are identifiable by the use of the word 'the' in the natural language version: 'the meaning of life' and 'the colour of ideas'.

From another perspective, they are 'loaded questions': they are a proposition followed by a question that only makes sense if the proposition is true. Russell's famous 'The present king of France is bald' deconstructs in the same way.

For the sake of advancing the discussion, I'll hypothesise that all questions that are category errors can be deconstructed in this way, to be a stapled Claim and Question. An even stronger hypothesis, of which I feel less confident, is that they all involve Definite Descriptions ('what is the X of Y?' or 'does the X Y?').

A few more examples would be good, to put that hypothesis to the test. Unfortunately my mind is a blank right now as I search for examples of category errors. I expect that searching this site for 'category error' would turn up some good examples though.

What is the meaning of life?' question. It is not at all clear, in this case, that 'life' is the kind of thing to which 'meaning' would be applicable at all. Which (to be absolutely clear) is not to say that 'there is no meaning to life', but that it is grammatically inappropriate to speak of life as having, or even not having, a meaning at all. — StreetlightX

I don't agree. Perhaps I could concede that the wording is misleading, insofar as it suggests that life has a meaning. But if the question was phrased, 'what is it to live meaningfully?', or, 'what is required to live a meaningful life?', or 'is life meaningful for you?' I think it's a perfectly meaningful question. But it's also a very unpopular question in today's academy, precisely because it is rather non-PC to suggest that such a question might be legitimate. And the reason why, is that so much of the modern era has been concerned with draining the idea of meaning from the world - Weber's disenchantment. It also suggests that 'meaning' might be something which is not the prerogative of the individual to declare the existence of; and I think we would like to think that meaning is something we project or devise, or that, at any rate, it is something that requires our assent.

I have a book by Eagleton, called The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, which has a perfectly intelligible discussion of what it means to ask such a question, and whether it can be asked - which it answers in the affirmative.

But I think the basic problem is that the idea that life might be actually meaningful just sounds a tad religious.

It is not at all clear, in this case, that 'life' is the kind of thing to which 'meaning' would be applicable at all. — StreetlightX

With the use of most common words, such as "life", there is enough ambiguity to spread an unhealthy dose of category error all around.

For W. philosophical practice (i.e. linguistic analysis) leaves everything as found, which I take to mean that it does not add anything new, it's just dissolves confusions. In this way, it's not productive. — Πετροκότσυφας

How do you believe that philosophical practise can leave things as found, while at the same time dissolve confusions? Doesn't dissolving confusions require taking things found as confused, and re-presenting them in an unconfused way?

Maybe this tension begins to ease, and Deleuze's philosophy just goes one step further, once we take into account that Deleuze's production of concepts (and their overall treatment) is firmly related to specific circumstances and practices. — Πετροκότσυφας

Yeah exactly! I think Deleuze shows how one can take on board Witty style criticism, and basically turn it inside out: yes, all language use must take place in a concrete language-game, etc: but this is just what philosophy has been doing since time immemorial - and with productive results! And I think you're right that Witty wouldn't necessarily endorse this kind of 'extension', as it were, but at my most critical, I feel that his uncharitableness was simply a function of his unfamiliarity with philosophy.

And please, I could talk about this stuff all day, and it's not entirely off topic! I mean, part of what's at stake here is what philosophy 'is'; the notion of conceptual consistency as the core of philosophical practice, for example, which follows if one understands category errors as a kind of philosophical diagnostic tool, directly bears on what it means to do philosophy as a whole - and this is something Deleuze brings out when he speaks of the "endo-" and "exo-" consistency of concepts in his What Is Philosophy?. And interestingly, he employs this property of concepts to demonstrate how logical analysis literally cannot deal with concepts, and thus is totally inadequate to philosophy - which again might link back to his abhorrence of the logical positivists and by extension, Wittgenstein. Anyway, I'm missing a few steps in this story, but it's a nice little link, if you can make the leaps.

Ha, that's even more critical than I am. But yeah, that makes sense.

To be clear, I didn't mean to imply that meaning-of-life questions are, well, categorically category mistakes - although I agree, my phrasing came off that way. Rather it's that meaning-of-life questions - like any other 'philosophical' question' - are themselves meaningful only to the extent that sense is made of them. These questions are not 'eternal' questions, handed down from on high; they have their sense only to the extent that the very terms in which they are posed already circumscribe the kind of answers to which they correspond. One 'answers' a meaning-of-life question not by laying out, as it were, a series of ready-made answers, each of which is assessed as to it's 'validity' or 'correctness' with only one remaining at the end.

Rather, one proceeds by asking about the articulation between meaning and life, forging - creatively - a conceptual consistency between both that would avoid any kind of category mistake. To borrow a juridical phrase, questions in philosophy ought to be considered nonsensical until proven otherwise. If I picked 'what is the meaning of life?' as exemplary of a question prone to being treated as a category mistake, it is because more often than not, the question is treated precisely as self-evident in it's extension. That is, more often than not, it is nonsense. The free will question - which happens to be littering the forum recently - is another I think is mostly nonsense, where people mostly literally have no idea what they are talking about, and are mostly cobbling together pieces of word salad which are 'not even wrong'.

So there's a kind of mutability I'm more than willing to admit here: what is a category mistake in one approach might not be in another: witness Gooseone's mention of synaesthesia with respect to coloured ideas. But there is nothing self-evident about the meaningfullness of such - or any - question whatsoever, and moreover, the attempt to work out the question is itself the very practice of philosophy. If there's any kind of 'moral' to my thread it's simply: be sceptical about sense; the fact that certain questions look grammatically correct ('what is the meaning of life?') shouldn't deceive us into thinking that there is any sense whatsoever to these kinds of questions (this is Wittgenstein's lesson). But sense is not something that can be specified a priori; only ever in it's working-through.

I actually believe that there's no such thing as 'category mistakes'. I subscribe to the idea that nonsense arises only when we fail to provide a clear meaning to our words, and never because some punitively nonsensical string of words kind of means something, and by virtue of this meaning they generate a 'mistake' or a logical 'clash' of meaning. And I want to claim that on the first understanding of nonsense (where nonsense is simply the lack of sense) the kind of philosophical criticism that you envision is not available (there's no apriori rule that allows you to determine which combinations of words are nonsense), and the second view is simply mistaken, if not incoherent (that is, the view that nonsense is a species of 'defective meaning').

(I should also mention that my views here are largely derived from Cora Diamond's reading of the Tractatus - the so-called 'resolute' understanding of nonsense, which I believe can also be found in W's later philosophy (e.g., see PI 500: "When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation."), so I believe that you are wrong to ascribing to W' any such view)

I think there are two common ways for understanding what a 'category mistake' is supposed to be. On the first, category mistakes arise when we have a sentence that attempts to combine words that refer to things that somehow necessarily cannot be combined or put together in reality. So to take your example, one might argue that something in the nature of color and ideas preclude the predication of color to ideas. But this I believe is an incoherent position. If we are talking about the nature of the things in the world to which we are referring by our words, then it doesn't seem plausible that we can know apriori how things can and cannot be 'combined' in reality (and it is not clear in the first place what 'combined' is supposed to mean here anyway). For example we don't know apriori which substances chemically react and which don't, and for this reason we must perform experiments to know this (and there's no reason to think that the case of color and ideas (or whatever) is any different). But if this is an empirical question, then it must make sense to ask about any two substances whether they are or aren't chemically reactive, since even if they are not, it would be false and not nonsense to say that they are (and if it was nonsense, then chemical experiments would've been superfluous).

A different way to understand the idea of category mistakes would be to say that certain sentences are nonsense because of the pre-existing meaning of the words that compose them. So to take your example again, one could say that the claim that ideas have color is nonsense because the meaning of 'color' and 'ideas' somehow precludes their combination in the sentence; the sentence is in some sense semantically or grammatically 'ill formed'. And this claim I think is plainly false, because words in natural language don't fall neatly into 'categories' as you say; it seems to me that whatever 'categories' you would assign to any word, it will be always easy to come up with counterexamples.

So to illustrate, I think it is very easy to come up with an examples where your alleged 'categorically mistaken' sentence would make sense--without changing the meaning of the words, or using them in a 'metaphorical' or 'non-literal' sense. Suppose that the physicalist identity theory turns out to be true, and every time a person entertains an idea, there happens to be a brain state with a particular color (e.g., the neurons change color or something of that sort). Another possibility: imagine a synesthetic tribe of people that always see colors whenever they think about something, and so they classify their thoughts according to color. Is anything about the 'conventional meaning' of 'color' or 'ideas' entitles you to rule out such uses of language as somehow necessarily nonsensical? I think that would be indefensible thing to say. It's true that we usually do not use color terms to talk about ideas, but we do use other similar adjectives like "dark ideas" or "bright ideas".

Or think about the case of sounds or musical notes: we call certain notes 'high' or 'low', and also low sounds 'dark' and high sounds 'bright' (is a high note 'high' in the same sense that a mountain is high? yes and no). Clearly nothing about the 'literal' meaning of high/low or bright/light (in the sense of high/low places and bright/light colors etc.) determines whether it makes sense to talk about sound or pitch in this way; there's nothing logically/grammatically/semantically necessary about these terms that tells you that it is either permissible or impermissible to apply these predicates to sounds. It so happens that we can make sense of such talk for various sorts of reasons, but not by virtue of some 'metaphysical' or 'semantic' fact that we've discovered about the predicates.

So the moral is that the idea of 'category mistakes' is either false, or philosophically useless. You cannot demonstrate that some sentence doesn't make sense just by inspecting the words from which it is composed and assigning a logical/semantic/metaphysical categories to which they belong. Language simply doesn't work this way, since meaning is a very plastic thing that can develop and extend in various unpredictable ways. Here's a final example: some axioms of euclidean geometry used to be considered logically necessary in the strongest sense of the word, until people constructed new types of geometry where it suddenly did make sense to deny them, and this happened without either changing the meaning of the words or using a metaphorical talk. So the point is that even the meaning of technical terms in mathematics and geometry is not 'fixed' in advance, so that we are entitled to say that once and for all such and such sentences must be false or nonsense no matter what.

Hah, I was waiting for the synaesthesia response. But then, one has provided a context by which one could make sense of such a question. And part of my point was that is just what is needed: sense-making can be understood as simply another way of saying 'context-providing': of showing how a difference makes a difference, of elaborating the stakes behind any one question. — StreetlightX

But if any sentence can be made sense of in a suitable context, then what's the point of talking about 'category errors' in the first place? If identifying a "confusion of kinds" (as you put in your OP) is not a sufficient condition for rendering a certain sentence nonsensical, then I don't see any philosophical utility in this idea (to condense the main point of my previous lengthy post).

I think we agree far more than we disagree. For instance, I don't think that category mistakes are the results of either (1) the combination of things that 'necessarily' cannot be combined, nor (2) because of the pre-existing meanings of words. Neither an appeal to the 'nature of things' nor to 'pre-existing meanings' is necessary for category mistakes to exist. Moreover, as I elaborated in my reply to Wayfarer, category mistakes are never, as it were, categorical; what may seem to be a categorical mistake, may become, after some tinkering, not one. As you said, at some point people began to speak of musical notes as dark and bright, importing, as it were, a specular vocabulary into a musical one. But one could no longer ask - without further tinkering - how many lumens this or that melody is. Or, one could ask how many lumens a particular melody is, if one rejigs a little bit (or perhaps alot), exactly what a lumen refers to in the latter context.

But this new, musical lumen, if we can call it that, which now has an 'autonomous' meaning of it's own, as it were, could not be treated in the same manner - or used in the exact same manner, the same language-game - as it's specular 'parent'. If one were to start asking how many musical lumens it would take to light up the room for the sake of reading, somewhere, someone has messed up. Of course you could add further dimensions and context to make the latter question meaningful, but this would entail a further transformation in semantic resonance and so on. Part of the point here is that philosophy can be a minefield of questions about the number of musical lumens it takes to light up a room.

Which is all a roundabout, very boring way of saying: of course there are category mistakes! One can of course 'come up' with a new, novel meanings for every apparently mismatched pair of words, but not without paying a certain semantic price. Category mistakes happen when this price is not paid. So one does not need to at all hold to any kind of notion about the fixity of meanings or the 'naturalness' of kinds in order to accept that category mistakes exist; I certainly don't believe in any such thing. So there's no need to throw out the baby of category mistakes with the dirty bathwater of natural meanings of kinds. Language may be plastic, but it is also viscous. In any case, Witty's constant admonishments about the illusions of grammar or the idling engine of certain manners of langauge-(un?)use are nothing if not warnings about just this kind of uncritial use of transformed words.

One can of course 'come up' with a new, novel meanings for every apparently mismatched pair of words, but not without paying a certain semantic price. — StreetlightX

But what prize?

And also notice that in the examples that I described we do not come up with a new meaning, but rely on the 'old meaning' which is extended to new cases that no one thought about before.

Of course I agree that if someone talks about measuring the brightness of a sound by using lumens, without providing any concrete explanation of what he means, then it would be a good prima fecie reason to suppose that he is talking nonsense. But my point is that you cannot know this just by looking at the sentence which he utters (that is, only from the particular words from which it is composed and their combination). There's nothing intrinsically erroneous in this or that combination of words so that you could have an easy or quick philosophical method for identifying 'category mistakes'.

Thus, as I said in my other response to you, it is not clear to me what is the philosophical utility of the term 'category mistake', if you don't mean it to be understood either semantically or metaphysically. If you simply use it to be synonymous with "words that lack sense" then by calling it this name, it doesn't explain anything about why some words happen to be nonsense (in this or that context) nor does it tell you how to identify whether something really is nonsense.

(and also I should note that this is not how 'category mistakes' are commonly understood by philosophers, so I think the way that you use the term is pretty misleading, and so is your explanation of the term in the OP)

But what price?

And also notice that in the examples that I described we do not come up with a new meaning, but rely on the 'old meaning' which is extended to new cases that no one thought about before. — Fafner

The 'price paid' obviously depends on the change of context in question. There's no a prioricy to this, you said it yourself. And really, I'm not sure how this is such a contentious point. The meanings of words are not simply cumulative: at some point, they change to an extent that they are no longer, as it were, commensurate with their old use. Off the top of my head, the words 'subject' and 'object', for example, used to have almost the exact opposite meaning of what they are commonly understood to mean today. If one starts to mix n' match both meanings at will, one will not be speaking much sense. This is not so wild a point.

Sometimes, of course, the mixing of incommensurate senses it not as obvious. To take an example out of my recent receding, one can distinguish between (at least) eight different senses of the word 'freedom' (all of which are 'internally consistent', as it were), and demonstrate that when some of these are run together, one ends up with some pretty rough conceptual difficulties (which is what Raymond Geuss does in his essay "Freedom As an Ideal", Outside Ethics - the book in fact in full of studies of this kind, on 'well known' ethical and political concepts, which he makes it his mission to distinguish the different senses of). This 'running together' is not simply nonsense, but is in fact a result of an unwarranted mixing together of 'kinds' of (concepts of) freedom, not all of which can be spoken about in the same breath without causing issues with conceptual inconsistency. And it is awfully interesting work.

I feel this is all very obvious and trivial and it's confusing to me why this ought to be spelled out at all.

But my point is that you cannot know this just by looking at the sentence which he utters (that is, only from the particular words from which it is composed and their combination). There's nothing intrinsically erroneous in this or that combination of words so that you could have an easy or quick philosophical method for identifying 'category mistakes'. — Fafner

Sure, and I did not claim, or I do not intend to claim, that there is anything 'intrinsically erroneous' about any particular use of words. But to say it once more, one does not need to in order to affirm that category mistakes exist.

This 'running together' is not simply nonsense, but is in fact a result of an unwarranted mixing together of 'kinds' of (concepts of) freedom, not all of which can be spoken about in the same breath without causing issues with conceptual inconsistency. — StreetlightX

I can agree with this formulation, though it still leaves open the question of how we ought to identify whenever a word/concept is used in the same or a different sense within a given context. And this is the point at which many philosophers (even some 'followers' of Wittgenstein, like P.M.S Hacker or Paul Horwich) fall into the trap of attempting to come up with semantical or metaphysical theories to explain how words mean what they mean. The challenge here (at least if you are a Wittgenstenian) is to avoid this sort of theorizing, and still have a clear method of providing a philosophically illuminating analysis of meaning or uses of language.

The challenge here (at least if you are a Wittgenstenian) is to avoid this sort of theorizing, and still have a method of providing a philosophically illuminating analysis of meaning or uses of language. — Fafner

I agree, and moreover I think this art, this ability to create or mobilize concepts that are immanent to whatever problematic they attempt to tackle, is one particular to the philosopher. Deleuze refers to this as a philosophical taste which must be cultivated: "what appears as philosophical taste in every case is love of the well-made concept..." - recalling here that taste is the mode of aesthetic judgement par excellence, a type of judgement that is both - in Kant's formulation - subjective and universal (and thus not merely particular); a kind of judgement that expressly charts a middle path between "semantical or metaphysical theories".

An aspect of this 'taste', I want to argue, is having what I called in the OP a sensitivity to category errors, where this sensitivity acts as a kind of conceptual guard-rail, keeping us from crossing wires and running 'incommensurate' senses of concepts together (and to emphasize again, this requires no commitment to pre-established meanings!). Remembering as well the sensate is an aesthetic category too!


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This is a very interesting, unique take on the topic, and I have a response to it, but sleep calls at the moment, so bear with me : )

Amen! Amen! And a reasonable way to start is with definitions. Even if wrong they're correctable, and in any case front-load and highlight possible errors and need for refinement and adjustment.

To even ask - and make sense of - a question like 'what is the meaning of life?' is already to commit to an entire web of presuppositions regarding the kind of thing both life and meaning are, — StreetlightX

A good question is like a mountain to be climbed. For some of them, preparation and approach is more important than the climb. A sense also reflected in a quote from Lincoln, " Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

(Y) Makes sense to me.

Perhaps one of the confusions underlying this area is the 'domain of discourse' within which such discussions take place. I mean, I can imagine an undergraduate tutorial group discussion of 'the meaning of life' in the context of a philosophy class: 'the meaning of life (or lack thereof) in French Existentialism'; 'Reflections on the meaning of life in Aristotle's Politics'; and so on. But in that situation, the discussion is framed by what Camus and Sartre said, or what Aristotle said, which provides at least a framework of customary usages (even if the participants disagree with them). The problem is in contemporary culture is that we can't assume which, if any, of such 'domains of discourse' provide a normative background for the discussion; so what the participants mean by very general terms, such as 'will', or 'intention' or 'meaning' (or life!) can't be simply assumed, as each participant may bring a very different perspective to bear on the question. So I think that's what you're driving at with 'category mistakes', and I think it's basically correct; but it's also a reflection of the times, and the medium (namely, the Internet).

It does so without inventing new concepts. — Πετροκότσυφας

This incompatibility of "leaves everything as found" with "dissoIves confusions" is not related to creating concepts though. To dissolve confusion implies that things were found in a confused state, so to dissolve the confusion is not to leave everything as found.

In the case of category error, a single word may be used in different ways, so this may result in the confusion of category error. To dissolve the confusion does not require creating concepts, but clarifying existing ones. So, in SX's example, "life" might mean 1: "the condition which distinguishes active plants and animals (living things) from inanimate things", as in "plants have life" or 2: "life" might mean simply "living things", as in "life on earth". So when someone asks about the meaning of life, if we take life in sense #2, the question might very well appear as nonsense. But if we take life in sense #1, then the question makes sense because we are concerned with the meaning of "the condition" which distinguishes animate from inanimate things. Since sense #2 does not make sense in this context, and sense #1 makes sense in this context, it is very clear that to interpret using sense #2 is to make a category error, as 1 refers to a description which we are looking for the meaning of, and 2 refers to things .

In Wittgenstein's PI, he brings up the notion of "same". Is the chair the "same" chair which was here yesterday, or not? If the chair today has the same description as the one yesterday, we'd be inclined to say that it is the same chair. Now what if someone switched it over night? Then despite having the same description, it is not the same chair. Suppose that the chair wasn't switched out, but it was somewhat changed, damaged, or painted, such that it doesn't have the same description. We still call it the "same" chair despite the fact that it doesn't have the same description. So there are two distinct ways in which we use "same", 1) having an equal description, and 2) having a temporal continuity of existence. If we mix these up, it's category error, 1) "same" refers to a description, 2) "same" refers to a thing.

More and more, I'm convinced that perhaps the most important skill in philosophy involves the diagnosis of category errors: errors in which there is a confusion of kinds. For example, one might ask, 'what color are ideas?'. Assuming no clever play on words or metaphorical flourish, this is, prima facie, a nonsense question. It takes one 'kind' of thing, ideas, and asks of it a question to which another kind of thing, colors, do not apply. Because of this confusion in kind, one cannot answer this question either correctly or wrongly. The question itself is confused in it's very formulation. Any answers to this question would be 'not even wrong'.

The example above is fairly straightforward. Things become confusing however - and philosophically precarious - when category errors are less obvious because of certain illusions of grammar. One immediate example of this lies in the ever popular 'What is the meaning of life?' question. It is not at all clear, in this case, that 'life' is the kind of thing to which 'meaning' would be applicable at all. Which (to be absolutely clear) is not to say that 'there is no meaning to life', but that it is grammatically inappropriate to speak of life as having, or even not having, a meaning at all. One may take issue with this particular example, and insist that one can, in fact, make sense of the question. Doing so, though, would involve specifying what is meant both by 'life' and by 'meaning', and demonstrating how the two can be articulated together as being of commensurate kinds.

I want to suggest that this kind of work, of making sense of questions, is perhaps the majority of the philosopher's work. To even ask - and make sense of - a question like 'what is the meaning of life?' is already to commit to an entire web of presuppositions regarding the kind of thing both life and meaning are, and dilating upon these presuppositions is just to do philosophy. Gilles Deleuze once wrote that 'every problem always has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is stated... and of the means and terms at our disposal for stating it". Which is to say that every philosophical 'problem' is co-eval with it's 'solution', that the two invariably come as a pair, and these is no way of posing a (true) problem that does not already contain, in the very terms in which it is posed, it's own solution.

One final way of trying to understand the above is that above all, 'philosophical work' is the work of 'sense-making'; 'making' here understood in the artisanal sense of forging and assembling. That certain questions have any sense at all, simply mustn't be taken for granted. Questions must 'prove themselves' worthy of sense through elaboration. As a means to do this, category errors, and our sensitivity to them, mark our ability to recognize the limits of sense-making efforts, the points at which our sense-making constructions fail, and are, as it were, the first and perhaps most important tool in the philosopher's toolkit. This is especially important insofar as philosophy is largely a matter of concept-mongering, and it's through the delicate probing for category errors that we can ensure the conceptual consistency of not merely our 'answers', but more importantly, our questions too (as with the 'meaning of life' question).

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Incidentally, Wittgenstein's PI might be taken to be nothing other than red-light warning against the dangers of category errors, but I just mention this just as food for thought. — StreetlightX

People should function intellectually in whatever way meets their needs.

Reason, logic, grammar, concepts, etc. are tools to be employed to do the work one wants and/or needs done.

Arguments like yours above make it sound like logic, grammar, etc. are the work, not tools for doing the work.

Probably more people would be able to experience satisfying intellectual lives if we would stop splitting hairs over what does and does not qualify as science, philosophy, etc.; what is the right way to do them; whether or not they are what people say they are; etc. and instead encouraged every person to employ whatever tools he/she needs to in whatever manner he/she needs do the work he/she needs/wants to do (finding the meaning of life; understanding the nature of things; knowing what is right/wrong; etc.).

The more that I participate in forums like The Philosophy Forum the more that I am beginning to think that philosophy is an anti-intellectual enterprise/tradition. Maybe it is the humanities' own anti-intellectualism that explains their present decline.

For a moment there I thought you might have actually been responding to the OP, only to realize that the only way you could have reached this conclusion:

Arguments like yours above make it sound like logic, grammar, etc. are the work, not tools for doing the work. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

...is to literally not have read a word of the OP (charitably assuming you are not simply grossly incompetant at reading). Nice off-topic rant though.

The question about the meaning of life ('meaning', that is, taken in an overarching sense) is coherent if your premise is that life has an "author" who intended it to have such a meaning, and the question is incoherent otherwise.

So, it really isn't a question of "category error" at all, but rather a matter of being coherent and consistent in relation to your founding presuppositions.

The question about the meaning of life (meaning, that is, in an overarching sense) is coherent if your premise is that life has an "author" who intended it to have such a meaning, and the question is incoherent otherwise. — John

We can look for the meaning of something without assuming that the thing has an author. Geologists determine the meaning of rock structures.

By the way, to assume that anything with meaning must have an author is a category mistake. Some things with meaning have an author, some do not, but try not to mix up those categories.

The question about the meaning of life ('meaning', that is, taken in an overarching sense) is coherent if your premise is that life has an "author" who intended it to have such a meaning, and the question is incoherent otherwise. — John

Why?

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I mean, this kind of response/post is, unfortunately, the kind of thing the OP is trying to correct against. You can't just make this kind of blunt assertion - 'the question about the meaning of life is coherent if your premise is that life has an "author" who intended it to have such a meaning' - without explaining what the relationship between life, authorship, and meaning is. To be as harsh as possible, this is pretty much - to a tee - the exact kind of statement which is 'not even wrong'. There is simply no way to proceed here - other than to ask you to elaborate. It is literally impossible - at this point - to assess your assertion because you've provided no reason for (or against) it; at this point it remains a seemingly grammatically correct sentence lacking any and all substance. I know this will come off harsh, but you've provided a nice object lesson into exactly - exactly - the kind of thing out of which utter confusion blooms, the idling engine of language which the entirety of Wittgenstein is pitched against.

Yes, but that is not meaning in an "overarching" sense, but meaning within a context.

I know this will come off harsh, but you've provided a nice object lesson into exactly - exactly - the kind of thing which ought to be expunged from philosophy entirely. — StreetlightX

Ironically it is your response that is an "object lesson" in category error, because you are attributing your own prejuidical assumptions to a context that doesn't share them. You are presupposing what you are called upon to demonstrate.

What are you even talking about?