The error of assigning to something a quality or action that can properly be assigned to things only of another category, for example, treating abstract concepts as though they had a physical location.
‘Indeed, some opponents of temporal-parts theories contend that the theory rests on just such a category mistake - the mistake of treating persisting objects as if they were processes.’
‘To apply the political term ‘authoritarian’ to an ontological account may at first seem to be a simple category mistake.’
‘In the words of the philosophers, it is a category mistake to put miracles and laws in the same set.’
‘To suggest that embodied chemical properties can solve systemic institutional problems is to commit a serious category mistake.’
‘Atheism is primarily an episode in the history of the decline of Christianity, and the idea that there is anything resembling an atheist tradition beyond that limited context is a category mistake.’
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