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. — Gooseone
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
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
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
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
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
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).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 what prize?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 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
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
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.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
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
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
It does so without inventing new concepts. — Πετροκότσυφας
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
Arguments like yours above make it sound like logic, grammar, etc. are the work, not tools for doing the work. — WISDOMfromPO-MO
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
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
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
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