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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 Ref
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?
| 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] |