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DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-N005-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-N005-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/categories/v-1

2. Categories in Ryle

The most noteworthy modern contribution to the theory of categories is that of Gilbert Ryle, in that he tries to throw light on the difficulty which Aristotle left entirely obscure: how to identify and discriminate between categories (see Ryle, G. §2). Ryle contends that one determines the logical category or type of an expression by ascertaining the field of sentence-forms into which it can enter without resultant absurdity. For example, ‘four’ can complete the frame ‘.….is a prime number’ to yield a meaningful (if false) sentence, while ‘Socrates’, or so Ryle would urge, cannot. Such nonsense exemplifies what Ryle famously dubbed the ‘category-mistake’, the production of absurdity as the upshot not of lexical or grammatical irregularity but of the vain effort to combine the logically uncombinable. He conceived of category theory as a diagnostic tool for the exposure and resolution of chronic philosophical disputes. Ryle proposed that disputants on either side of, say, the mind–body problem are really at cross-purposes: they have put forward propositions which only seem to conflict, since their difference in type removes the possibility of any logical relations, whether of implication or of incompatibility, holding between them. At one point Ryle was willing to go so far as to proclaim that ‘philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines’ (1949: 10).

Although Ryle regarded Aristotle’s theory as the ancestor of his own, an obvious dissimilarity is that Rylean categories, defined as they are by multiple logical relations, are potentially unlimited in number: Ryle was keen to explore what he termed ‘the logical geography of concepts’, not to engage in pigeonholing. The great awkwardness looming over Ryle’s theory is that all ventures to make out a principled difference between mere falsehood and the nonsense allegedly distinctive of category-mistakes have come to grief. But if Ryle did not finally achieve a strict criterion for the identification of categories, he nevertheless did successfully sharpen the powerful and once widely-shared intuition that certain propositions – some of philosophical importance – must be rejected not as false, but as (veiled) nonsense.

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Citing this article:
Wardy, Robert. Categories in Ryle. Categories, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N005-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/categories/v-1/sections/categories-in-ryle.
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