Deliberate commission of category mistake. Crombie vs. Ryle
✍ Scribed by Philip Bashor; Arifa Farid
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Year
- 1987
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 498 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0020-7047
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Crombie's acceptance of the deliberate commission of a category mistake in his defense of the meaningfulness of theological statements raises a pointed challenge to the philosophy of Ryle which seems not to have been specifically addressed in subsequent literature. We review the analysis which leads Crombie into it, including concepts of anomaly, deficiency, affinity, and inadequate notion, noting basic differences in method and attitude from Ryle. We express our own agreements and disagreements in keeping with an overall concern for the preservation of rationality in this sphere of language, finding acceptable distinct contributions to that end from both. I.M. Crombie's papers analyzing the meaningfulness of theological statements 1 seem to have elicited more attention to issues of eschatological verification, falsifiability, analogy, authority, and parable, than specifically to his notion of deliberately committing a category mistake. 2 Moreover, attention to the latter notion seems not to have been discussed in its relation to Ryle whose concept is here rather directly challenged. 3
In this paper we wish to highlight Crombie's position on category mistake in theological language, formalizing it to some degree and referring it to Ryle, then to conclude with some judgment about differences between them. Our overall concern is for preservation of rationality within these differences, which seems to be in danger if Crombie's language is taken seriously, Crombie finds that talk of spirit -a being outside space and time -is necessary to fix the reference of theological statements, admitting, in deference to Ryle, that talk of such spirit as an independent entity is a category mistake. But, Crombie asserts, "how the word is used (and this, of course, defines such meaning as it has for us) in the theological context is by the deliberate corn-