Single Idea 8632

[catalogued under 2. Reason / F. Fallacies / 8. Category Mistake / a. Category mistakes]

Full Idea

It would be remarkable if a property abstracted from external things could be transferred without any change of sense to events, to ideas and to concepts, like speaking of 'blue ideas' or 'salty concepts'.

Gist of Idea

You can't transfer external properties unchanged to apply to ideas

Source

Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884], §24)

Book Reference

Frege,Gottlob: 'The Foundations of Arithmetic (Austin)', ed/tr. Austin,J.L. [Blackwell 1980], p.31


A Reaction

Since those phrases make perfectly good metaphorical sense, I presume the Frege was a fairly literal sort of chap. Is this the earliest emergence of the idea of a category mistake?