0 a mistake in which something is said or believed to be in one category (= group) when in fact it belongs to another: --
This is a category mistake, because a number is not the sort of thing that can be concatenated (though a numeral is).
This is a category mistake.
To invoke counselors' attitudes as a rejoinder to the claim that cost-saving is a consideration in the provision of genetic services is to make a category mistake.
They are so inextricably bound with process, personality, and perceptual variables that to tuck all of them under the rubric of 'structure' is to commit a category mistake.
That would indeed be a category mistake.
I consider his, however he defines it, too narrow and the real category mistake.
Asking whether the spatial strategy is rational or not is a category mistake.
This seems no more than a basic category mistake.