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Full Idea
'Socrates and killing are two' would be an illegitimate sentence according to the doctrine of types.
Gist of Idea
The theory of types makes 'Socrates and killing are two' illegitimate
Source
Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14)
Book Ref
Russell,Bertrand: 'My Philosophical Development' [Routledge 1993], p.119
A Reaction
This nicely shows how Ryle's notion of a 'category mistake', although it is a commonsense observation of bogus reasoning, arises out of Russell's logical analysis of sets. Of course, the theory of types has its critics.
| 11034 | The differentiae of genera which are different are themselves different in kind [Aristotle] |
| 12491 | Asking whether man's will is free is liking asking if sleep is fast or virtue is square [Locke] |
| 8632 | You can't transfer external properties unchanged to apply to ideas [Frege] |
| 8468 | The sentence 'procrastination drinks quadruplicity' is meaningless, rather than false [Russell, by Orenstein] |
| 6437 | The theory of types makes 'Socrates and killing are two' illegitimate [Russell] |
| 18002 | As well as a truth value, propositions have a range of significance for their variables [Russell] |
| 21561 | 'The number one is bald' or 'the number one is fond of cream cheese' are meaningless [Russell] |
| 18706 | Words of the same kind can be substituted in a proposition without producing nonsense [Wittgenstein] |
| 18004 | We can't do philosophy without knowledge of types and categories [Ryle] |
| 17998 | Category mistakes are either syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic [Magidor] |
| 18019 | People have dreams which involve category mistakes [Magidor] |