0 a mistake in which something is said or believed to be in one category (= group) when in fact it belongs to another:
Longino criticizes not only the limitations of the causal project but the category mistake it involves.
Ryle's central claim was that instances of dualism frequently represented category mistakes, and hence that they were really misunderstandings of the use of ordinary language.
If one accepts this assumption, however, it appears that the only reason left to believe that collective agency violates self-goal choice is a category mistake.
A category mistake involves modifying a thing with a predicate that does not and may not meaningfully apply to its ontology.
But it would be a category mistake to think that because principle pluralism, say, is subject to some decisive criticism, then moral pluralism necessarily fails.
This was generally recognized to be a category mistake.
That is, aspirations that were legitimate within a theocentric understanding of morality involve a category mistake if transferred to considerations of secular morality.
This seems no more than a basic category mistake.