Category Mistake Research Articles

Deliberate Ignorance and Myopic Intellectualist Understandings of Expertise: Are Philosophers of Education Epistemic Trespassers in Initial Teacher Education Programmes?

AbstractThis paper considers in conceptual terms the extent to which pre-service teachers’ disengagement with philosophy of education might usefully be explained in terms of the mistaken charge of (1) ‘epistemic trespassing’ frequently levelled against philosophers of education. This cohort charge philosophers of education with being ultracrepidarians—those who proffer opinions on subjects that they know nothing about. Contra this view, I argue that casting philosophers as epistemic trespassers—lofty theorists with nothing meaningful to contribute to professional practice—is a wrongful charge, or ‘epistemic vice’, based on a series of epistemic mistakes. These, individually and collectively, lead to a series of troubling costs in terms of impoverished professional formation and practice. To diagnose a plausible explanatory account of this phenomenon, I briefly turn to what I consider the main causes of this misattribution—more precisely—the four secondary category mistakes pre-service teachers make. Naturally a qualification is required. I contend these epistemic mistakes can rightfully be attributed to *some pre-service teachers in such determinations, which include: (2) misunderstanding standpoint epistemology (SE) in terms of automatic privilege being coextensive with first-personal authority (FPA); (3) overestimating the added value of deliberate/rational ignorance; (4) misguided intellectualist views of skills and expertise; and, (5) uncritical technicist attempts to emulate TikTok Exemplars with the allure of ‘Insta results’.

Beyond Admiration: Rethinking the Nature of Emulation qua Role Modelling

This paper seeks to disambiguate the nature of emulation – the method of learning from moral role models. Within neo-Aristotelian character education, emulation is considered a primary method of virtuous character development, yet what emulation is and what it involves remains obscure. I argue that this is largely due to a category mistake: the misconceptualisation of emulation as a mere emotion, rather than a moral virtue in its own right. Predominantly composed of virtuous emotion and necessarily entailing virtuous action, I propose a componential account of the virtue of emulation, which I synthesise with Aristotle’s theory of ‘four causes’. I then make visible the importance of phronesis to the emulative process and accordingly introduce a new concept – entangled phronesis – as the psycho-moral mechanism which underpins it. Subsequently, I highlight the developmentally sensitive nature of emulation by dividing it into two main types: pre-phronetic habituated emulation and phronetically-informed complete emulation.

Кант и «морская болезнь» современности

On the eve of the tercentenary of Kant’s birth, just as it was a hundred years ago, Kantianism is simultaneously on the receiving end of the blows of history and attacks by rival philosophical parties, both progressivist and reactionary. The radical wings of both parties perceive modernity as a depressing, nauseating period which must be broken with by moving toward the past or toward the future. One of the most original and profound diagnoses of this attitude was offered by Hans Jonas, who discerned in radical doctrines of a hundred years ago a similarity with the gnosticism of antiquity. Jonas’s diagnosis has not lost its relevance. That is why the central question addressed in this study is as follows: what prescription does the Kantian programme offer for modernity’s “gnostic dizziness?” I maintain that Kant’s critical turn is still an effective strategy by means of which to compensate for the sudden stresses and “gnostic impulses” provoked by the modern worldview revolution, bringing back an “orientation in thinking” which reorients the world process and individual activity. The imperative to always see and respect humanity in a particular individual warns against the “category mistake” committed by modern radicals who ascribe agency (subjectivity) to non-­human abstractions which cannot possess this property. In theory, Kant grounds the view that humanity should resign itself to the fact of its perspective being limited and local. Kantian practical philosophy provides the traveler with a map of regulative ideas and a “moral compass”, along with an explanation of disruptive factors, offering a working explanation of the situation and its possible outcomes. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” brings human beings back into focus and imagination to order, allowing for the hope that new challenges will be successfully met.

The educational salience of emulation as a moral virtue

ABSTRACT A foundational principle of neo-Aristotelian character education is that virtue can be cultivated, in particular through the emulation of moral role models, such as teachers. Yet despite the pedagogical appeal of role modelling, what emulation involves remains methodologically unclear. In this paper, I suggest that part of this ambiguity lies in a category mistake: the misconceptualisation of emulation as a mere emotion, rather than, as I argue, a virtue in its own right. Predominantly composed of virtuous emotion and necessarily entailing virtuous action, I propose a componential account of the virtue of emulation which I synthesise with Aristotle’s theory of “four causes”. Through doing so, I make visible how emulation operates in different ways depending on one’s degree of phronetic development and suggest a new concept—entangled phronesis—as the mechanism underpinning emulation. I then consider what these insights illuminate about role modelling in classroom contexts.

"Every Perception Is Accompanied by Pain!": Theophrastus's Criticism of Anaxagoras

abstract: Anaxagoras is notorious for his view that every perception is accompanied by pain but that not all concurrent pains are distinctly felt by the perceiving subject. This thesis is reported and criticized by Aristotle's heir Theophrastus in his De Sensibus . Traditionally, scholars believe that Theophrastus rejects Anaxagoras's thesis of the ubiquity of pain as counterintuitive, with the appeal to unfelt pain looking like a desperate category mistake given that pain is nothing but a feeling. Contra the traditional view, this paper argues that Theophrastus neither aims to defend ordinary phenomenology nor is bothered by the concept of unfelt pain; instead, he develops a series of new Aristotelian arguments to defend a controversial, optimistic picture about the distribution of affective qualities in animal life. More than a supplement to Aristotle's psychology, his engagement with Anaxagoras reveals an important yet often ignored ethical concern behind the Peripatetic philosophy of perception.

The Explorations of Descartes and Ryle’s Idea of Mind: An Appraisal

This paper attempts to explore the idea of mind on the basis of René Descartes and Gilbert Ryle’s vision. Descartes, a 17thcentury philosopher, developed a dualistic theory that posits the mind and body as distinct entities. According to him, the mind is an immaterial, non- extended entity with consciousness and rational thought, while the body is a material substance subject to physical laws. In contrast, 20th-century philosopher Ryle rejected the idea of a separate mental realm and argued for the unity of mind and body. He criticized Cartesian dualism, proposing that mental states and mental processes are not separate from bodily behavior but are intricately intertwined with it. This comparative analysis delves into Descartes’s arguments for dualism, including the interaction between mind and body through the pineal gland and his ideas on the mind’s independence from the body. On the other hand, Ryle’s critique of dualism is examined, with a focus on his concept of “category mistake” and his advocacy for behaviorism, which prioritizes observable behavior over unobservable mental states. By exploring these two contrasting perspectives, this paper aims to comprehensively understand the historical development and implications of the notion of mind. It highlights the influence of Descartes’s dualistic framework on philosophical discourse and Ryle’s efforts to challenge it, emphasizing the importance of considering the relationship between mind, body, and behavior in understanding human cognition and experience.

Traditionalist Jews and the Question of Whiteness

Abstract: This article has two main purposes. First, it aims to unpack the question "Are Jews white?" by insisting that the assignment of even ambiguous racial identities to "Jews" as an undifferentiated collective is a categorical mistake. It argues instead for a highly contextualized approach to the racialization of certain Jews or groups of Jews in certain times and places for certain purposes and from certain perspectives—which need not imply any lessening of the import of such racialization. Second, and more specifically, it aims to provoke a careful discussion of the racialization of traditionalist Jews in the particular context of growing and recently established residential enclaves in the suburbs of New York City, and suggests that legal or scholarly understanding of their difference as primarily "religious" is also mistaken.

Traditionalist Jews and the Question of Whiteness

Abstract: This article has two main purposes. First, it aims to unpack the question "Are Jews white?" by insisting that the assignment of even ambiguous racial identities to "Jews" as an undifferentiated collective is a categorical mistake. It argues instead for a highly contextualized approach to the racialization of certain Jews or groups of Jews in certain times and places for certain purposes and from certain perspectives—which need not imply any lessening of the import of such racialization. Second, and more specifically, it aims to provoke a careful discussion of the racialization of traditionalist Jews in the particular context of growing and recently established residential enclaves in the suburbs of New York City, and suggests that legal or scholarly understanding of their difference as primarily "religious" is also mistaken.

Aquinas and the Geopolitical Thinking of Pope Francis

This scientific article explores the notion of a Christian geopolitics and its compatibility with realpolitik and international relations. The analysis delves into the perspectives of Pope Francis, John Mearsheimer, and Catholic social thought principles to examine the moral implications of geopolitical strategies. Mearsheimer’s bait and bleed strategy in Ukraine is critiqued for its callousness and disregard for human life, while Francis’s emphasis on personal and social reform highlights the importance of ethics and the universal destination of goods. The article questions whether Christians can engage in realpolitik strategies that perpetuate poverty and violate the principles of human dignity and mercy. It further considers the implications for Catholic leaders in government and military roles, particularly in the context of upcoming U.S. presidential contenders. The analysis ultimately challenges the notion that a Christian geopolitics is a category mistake, advocating for a higher moral road in international relations.

Category Mistakes Electrified

AbstractOccurrences of sentences that are traditionally considered category mistakes, such as ‘The red number is divisible by three’, tend to elicit a sense of oddness in assessors. In attempting to explain this oddness, existing accounts in the philosophical literature commonly claim that occurrences of such sentences are associated with a defect or phenomenology unique to the class of category mistakes. It might be thought that recent work in experimental psycholinguistics—in particular, the recording of event-related brain potentials (patterns of voltage variation in the brain)—holds the potential to shed new light on this debate. I review the relevant experimental results, before arguing that they present advocates of accounts of category mistakes with a dilemma: either the uniqueness claims should be rejected, or the experimental technique in question cannot be used to test existing accounts of category mistakes in the manner that philosophers might hope.

Category Mistake 101: The Idea of the Desocialising University and the Last Intellectual

A considerable and growing body of literature has engaged in a critical reading of the nature and substance of shifts in not only the business practices, but the conditions for the very raison d’ėtre or telic identifiability of universities under current strategic political arrangements. Moving beyond the practices of academic economy in the business of higher education that reduce the intellectual worker to academic labourer enduring multiple forms of alienation, the paper considers what kind of critical setting there may be for reimagining the university in non-nostalgic ways. While the paper takes its cues pre-eminently from the Australian Higher Education Provider sector, it draws on the overlapping political theorising particularly from the N. American critics Wendy Brown and Henry Giroux. From their critiques of neoliberalism, the paper argues that asking what universities are for does not fare well when higher education institutions are subjected to neoliberal rationality.

Locating the Problem of Evil

I argue that James Sterba’s argument from evil involves a category mistake. He applies moral principles that pertain to ethical requirements that apply within creation to what may be called the ethics or axiology of creating and sustaining creation. The paper includes reflection on the relationship between justification and redemption, justice and mercy.

Statistical Modeling: The Three Cultures

Social scientists distinguish between predictive and causal research. While this distinction clarifies the aims of two research traditions, this clarity is blurred by the introduction of machine learning (ML) algorithms. Although ML excels in prediction, scholars are increasingly using ML not only for prediction but also for causation. While using ML for causation appears as a category mistake, this article shows that there is a third kind of research problem in which causal and predictive inference form an intricate synergy. This synergy arises from a specific type of statistical practice, guided by what we propose, the hybrid modeling culture (HMC). Navigating through a parallel debate in the statistical sciences, this article identifies key characteristics of HMC, thereby fueling the evolution of statistical cultures in the social sciences toward better practices—meaning increasingly reliable, valid, and replicable causal inference. A corollary of HMC is that the distinction between prediction and causation, taken to its limit, melts away.

The Weltanschauung of Howard Rachlin: Interdependencies among behaviors and contexts.

Through his broad perspectives and curiosity, Howard Rachlin took behaviorism, added critical perspectives and behavioral economics, and contributed substantially to developing behaviorism as an approach to addressing complex human actions and engagements. This essay describes the influence of Rachlin's work in three areas that reflect this broader growth of the field: 1) teleological behaviorism as a response to essentialist thinking about behavior, typified by Ryle's category mistake and including concepts in psychopathology; 2) self-control as choices among rewards differing by amount and delay and the application of this model to clinical and preventive interventions; and 3) behavioral economic modeling of social support as a commodity substitutable for other commodities of interest such as nicotine. These and the body of Rachlin's work suggest a view not only of interdependencies among behaviors, patterns of behavior, and their consequences, but more broadly, of interdependencies among different settings and their effects on behavior, leading to a behaviorism of systems and contexts. Replacing essentialist discourse of individuals, individual behaviors, and discrete influences, a world view or Weltanschauung emerges of diffuse interdependencies across patterns, individuals, settings, systems, probabilities, and consequences.

Decarbonization Is Our Costliest Challenge: It has no clear beginning or end, and it affects every aspect of life

In his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle, an English philosopher, introduced the term “category mistake.” He gave the example of a visitor to the University of Oxford who sees colleges and a splendid library and then asks, “But where is the university?” The category mistake is obvious: A university is an institution, not a collection of buildings.

Composition as Identity, the Identical With or Different From Argument in Bodhicaryāvatāra 8.90–103 (and Elsewhere), and Category Mistakes

Composition as Identity, the Identical With or Different From Argument in Bodhicaryāvatāra 8.90–103 (and Elsewhere), and Category Mistakes

Toward a Black–Queer Critical Rhetoricism

Toward a Black–Queer Critical Rhetoricism

Principles and Duties: A Critique of Common Morality Theory.

Tom Beauchamp and James Childress's revolutionary textbook, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, shaped the field of bioethics in America and around the world. Midway through the Principle's eight editions, however, the authors jettisoned their attempt to justify the four principles of bioethics -autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice-in terms of ethical theory, replacing it with the idea that these principles are part of a common morality shared by all rational persons committed to morality, at all times, and in all places. Other commentators contend that their theory has never been empirically confirmed and is unfalsifiable, since counterexamples can be deemed irrational, or as held by those living lives not committed to morality. The thesis of this paper is that common morality theory is the artifact of a category mistake-conflating common areas regulated by moral norms with common norms regulating moral conduct-that accords mid-twentieth century American liberal morality the status of transcultural, transtemporal, eternal moral truths. Such a conception offers bioethicists no tools for analyzing moral change-moral progress, regress, reform, evolution, devolution, or revolution-no theoretical basis for deconstructing structural classicism, racism, and sexism, or for facilitating international cooperation on ethical issues in the context of culturally based moral differences.

HAPPINESS AND THE METAPHYSICS OF AFFECT

This paper introduces a category of functional conditions to address certain difficulties that have arisen in philosophical work on the nature of happiness. In earlier work, I defended an emotional state theory of happiness on which being happy consists substantially in dispositional states, such as one’s propensity for a relaxed or cheerful mood. Hedonistic accounts of happiness, which reduce it to experiences of pleasure, were rejected partly on the grounds that they appear to commit a category mistake. However, the nature of this category mistake remained unclear, and the claimed dispositionality of happiness has likewise been challenged even by commentators otherwise sympathetic with an emotional state theory. Here I address these worries by sharpening the metaphysical underpinnings of the emotional state view as I have articulated it. Understanding happiness in terms of an individual’s functional condition resolves these puzzles in a way that helps to explain the distinctive significance of happiness.

On the "Outburst" of World Spirit

On the "Outburst" of World Spirit Joff P. N. Bradley (bio) My intervention comes after I recently listened to a 2019 Genron talk by cultural theorist Hiroki Azuma, Tokyo University emeritus professor Hidetaka Ishida, and Yuk Hui, the Hong Kong philosopher of technology (Azuma, Ishida, and Hui 2019). The title is "Is a Post-European Philosophy of/in Technology Possible?" They discuss for several hours the matter of the overcoming of modernity in Asian philosophy. They discuss the question and possibility of a post-European philosophy, invoking both the Kyoto School philosophies of Nishida and Nishitani and the neo-Confucianism of Mou Zongsan (1909–95). This is apparently to oppose the dominant European philosophies of technology (spirit and cybernetics), and indeed Hui looks to the Heidegger–Kyoto School relation for inspiration. They discuss how to overcome Western philosophy, how to turn to the East, how to orient to the East, how to develop a new form of Asian philosophy at the end of a form of Western metaphysics. I worry that they are speaking of the spirit that goes down in the evening land (Abendland) and rises in the East, in the land of the rising sun. This would be a category mistake, as Greece is the Orient for Heidegger. Morning land (Morgenland) is the Orient, it is Greece. And more than this, Greece is also Occidental. It partakes of the destiny and spirit of the Abendland of Europe. The Greeks are both the wellspring of the Orient and the beginning of European spirit. All of this overcoming and downgoing is made more puzzling as they discuss how to overcome modernity through modernity, how to overcome philosophy through Western philosophy, how to develop a unique Japanese philosophy out of what we can call the Destruktion (Abbau), "destruction" (Zerstörung), or "demolition" of Western philosophy. Hui looks to the Kyoto School and what he calls neo-Confucianism and asks if a Japanese thought could be distinct from its Western predecessor or form. I want to ask here: Could such a thought, a thought tied to technological spirit, somehow escape the spirit of Europe? Could it escape the World Spirit? Could it escape the destiny of the West? This seems problematic, because of course for Hegel "Asia" is that which only marks the beginning (Aufgang) of history. Europe is at the end of History. Could [End Page 21] there be a distinct technological spirit in Japan, a technological spirit in China or Korea or wherever? Should we turn for answers to the Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun (戸坂 潤・1900–1945), who suggests the technological spirit is precisely the scientific spirit (Kawashima, Schäfer, and Stolz 2013)? Could we have a multiplicity or plurality of different technological spirits, or indeed a new kind of technodiversity (Hui and Lemmens 2021)? I have been trying to find my own answer to these questions by turning to Bernard Stiegler and the question of spirit, going back to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and turning to Paul Valéry's thinking about the crisis of crisis and the crisis of spirit in postwar Europe, that is, the immanent spirit that pertains to industry and machines (Valéry 1919). This has brought me to Tosaka Jun and his thesis on technological spirit (技術的精神), where we find a rumination on technological spirit in 1930s Japan (see Nishikawa 2018), and in which the spirit of science or technology becomes synonymous with scientific or technological spirit. Technological spirit permeates the wider socius, and as we know, for Japan this had disastrous results during its fascist period. My point about the overcoming of modernity concerns the attempt to save spirit from spirit, to save spirit from itself. What kind of geopolitical or planetary thought could this become? What would the place of Japanese philosophy be in this geopolitical or planetary thought? And importantly, how can one shake off the metaphysical fascism and nationalism connected with Heidegger and the Kyoto School to develop this geopolitical thought? In the wake of Heidegger's black notebooks, this, I think, is not an easy task. Hui's discussion with Ishida and Azuma helped me to fathom some of these problems as something interesting is said, albeit unconsciously, in a...