The Presuppositional Account of Category Mistakes

Abstract

Category mistakes are a class of expressions which gain philosophical interest in virtue of their infelicity. They are grammatical and are composed entirely of sensible words; but, for some reason, still seem strange. A theory of category mistakes is tasked with identifying the route of this infelicity. In this paper, I consider Ofra Magidor's pragmatic presuppositional account of category mistakes. I argue that it offers plausible accounts of the infelicity of category mistakes and can help to delineate the class of category mistakes. However, I raise two different kinds of objections. First, I suggest that the presuppositional account fails to account for all category mistakes. Second, Magidor's theory requires that category mistakes are meaningful. I consider two of her arguments fail to establish this.