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Full Idea
Having rejected the syntactic approach and the meaninglessness view, one might feel that the last resort for explaining the defectiveness of category mistakes is to claim that they are truth-valueless (even if meaningful).
Gist of Idea
If category mistakes aren't syntax failure or meaningless, maybe they just lack a truth-value?
Source
Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.3.1)
Book Ref
Magidor,Ofra: 'Category Mistakes' [OUP 2013], p.91
A Reaction
She rejects this one as well, and votes for a pragmatic explanation, in terms of presupposition failure. The view I incline towards is just that they are false, despite being well-formed, meaningful and truth-valued.
| 18009 | Chomsky established the view that category mistakes are well-formed but meaningless [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| 18015 | The normal compositional view makes category mistakes meaningful [Magidor] |
| 18016 | Two good sentences should combine to make a good sentence, but that might be absurd [Magidor] |
| 18017 | If a category mistake is synonymous across two languages, that implies it is meaningful [Magidor] |
| 18021 | Category mistakes are meaningful, because metaphors are meaningful category mistakes [Magidor] |
| 18031 | If a category mistake has unimaginable truth-conditions, then it seems to be meaningless [Magidor] |
| 18030 | A good explanation of why category mistakes sound wrong is that they are meaningless [Magidor] |
| 18032 | Category mistakes are neither verifiable nor analytic, so verificationism says they are meaningless [Magidor] |
| 18034 | Category mistakes play no role in mental life, so conceptual role semantics makes them meaningless [Magidor] |
| 18037 | Maybe when you say 'two is green', the predicate somehow fails to apply? [Magidor] |
| 18039 | If category mistakes aren't syntax failure or meaningless, maybe they just lack a truth-value? [Magidor] |