Yes, but I haven't assumed that. An overarching meaning is a meaning which is real beyond the "inside" of a context. If there is no "outside" to life (which would mean that there is nothing intentional which is not contingent upon being a part of life), then life cannot be coherently said to have an overarching meaning.

It's a common tactic to feign ignorance when you cannot deal with an idea: your response is not "harsh" at all, but rather soft and unconvincing.

The other possibility is that you are so mired in your own prejudices that you really cannot understand what I am saying; in which case, my condolences.

What prejudices? All I said - in a few more words - is that you provided no reason to accept your assertion one way or another, rendering it more or less unintelligible. Was I wrong? It is prejudice that I literally cannot see what you did not write?

For millennia, within theistic contexts, it has been thought by philosophers and common folk alike that life has an author (God) who gives it an overarching meaning. There are many of both today who still believe this to be so. It is either simple-minded or prejudicially disingenuous to say that such an idea is incoherent, because it doesn't fit within the context of your own presuppositions about what reality is. If all you're really saying is that it is incoherent to you (and tacitly acknowledging that that is on account of your own presuppositions), then that is all fine, but it is also philosophically uninteresting, because all you are telling us is what your personal opinion is, and why should we care?

The more that I participate in forums like The Philosophy Forum the more that I am beginning to think that philosophy is an anti-intellectual enterprise/tradition. Maybe it is the humanities' own anti-intellectualism that explains their present decline. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Or it could also be the quality of people who turn up and post on internet fora. After all, there's no entry exam, and it's quite possible to post without knowing the first thing about the subject.

It is either simple-minded or prejudicially disingenuous to say that such an idea is incoherent... — John

I didn't say it was incoherent outright, I said it would be incoherent if left standing as-is, without elaboration into the relation between life, meaning and authorship. My only point is that your initial post was exactly exemplary of this lack of elaboration, without which, it is incoherent. This is not prejudice, unless the criteria for prejudice is a demand that a statement be afforded some or any kind of sense, in which case I'm prejudiced beyond all measure.

But why demand that I give sense to an idea which is eminently familiar and exhaustively elaborated (theology) within the philosophical tradition; a tradition that we should both be well enough familiar with?

The problem is in contemporary culture is that we can't assume which, if any, of such 'domains of discourse' provide a normative background for the discussion; so what the participants mean by very general terms, such as 'will', or 'intention' or 'meaning' (or life!) can't be simply assumed, as each participant may bring a very different perspective to bear on the question. So I think that's what you're driving at with 'category mistakes', and I think it's basically correct; but it's also a reflection of the times, and the medium (namely, the Internet). — Wayfarer

Hmm, I'm 50/50 on this. On the one hand, I think there is never not a 'universe-of-discourse', as you put it - and this is the case irrespective of the times or the medium or what-have-you. On the other hand, I think this has become more obvious in recent times, where one can no longer take for granted that someone else shares the same universe of discourse as you (and this especially so in philosophy - and as Deleuze says somewhere, there are no real discussions in philosophy - just people talking past each other...).

You think 'theology' has an internally undifferentiated, univocal, and consistent articulation between life, meaning and God? Not, of course, that you mentioned anything about the theological tradition in your initial post - you could be a crackpot basement theorist for all I know. In any case I take this as an admission that you didn't at all elaborate on your rather blunt, unargued for assertion, which was exactly my point to begin with.

For the sake of convenient context here is my "blunt, unargued for assertion":

The question about the meaning of life ('meaning', that is, taken in an overarching sense) is coherent if your premise is that life has an "author" who intended it to have such a meaning, and the question is incoherent otherwise.

So, it really isn't a question of "category error" at all, but rather a matter of being coherent and consistent in relation to your founding presuppositions. — John

Now, I haven't claimed that theology has "an internally undifferentiated, univocal and consistent articulation between life, meaning and God", and I don't need to. It may have many such articulations. But the idea common to most is that God is the creator (author) of this world and that God created this world for a purpose (gave it an overarching meaning). This is simply common knowledge.

Now all I have claimed is that the idea of life having an overarching meaning is not rightly understood as a category error per se (if it was it would be incoherent per se; which you yourself have denied). I have only pointed out that the idea is context dependent, insofar as it is only coherent and consistent if your premise is something along those lines (that there is a real, intentional infinitely intelligent transcendent being or spirit who created the world and gives it meaning). Theological models generally assume this, or something very much like this.

You haven't explained why I should have to elaborate and give sense to the idea of a meaning-giving transcendent being when many theological models that have already elaborated that idea abound and should be familiar to you at the very least in light of the fact that our culture and language in profound ways reflect the ideas of such speculative theologies.

↪WISDOMfromPO-MO For a moment there I thought you might have actually been responding to the OP, only to realize that the only way you could have reached this conclusion:

Arguments like yours above make it sound like logic, grammar, etc. are the work, not tools for doing the work. — WISDOMfromPO-MO
...is to literally not have read a word of the OP (charitably assuming you are not simply grossly incompetant at reading). Nice off-topic rant though. — StreetlightX

Before previously responding I read this:

But there is nothing self-evident about the meaningfullness of such - or any - question whatsoever, and moreover, the attempt to work out the question is itself the very practice of philosophy. If there's any kind of 'moral' to my thread it's simply: be sceptical about sense; the fact that certain questions look grammatically correct ('what is the meaning of life?') shouldn't deceive us into thinking that there is any sense whatsoever to these kinds of questions (this is Wittgenstein's lesson). But sense is not something that can be specified a priori; only ever in it's working-through — StreetlightX

I then responded with this: What may subjectively be "nonsense" to a lot of people or objectively be "nonsense" according to the present prevalent orthodoxy in an intellectual tradition or academic discipline may be the "sense" that at least one person needs to meet his/her intellectual needs. The fact that a lot of the thinking--thinking that may well be the final piece to a puzzle that somebody has been working on his/her whole life--that a lot of people utilize is often dismissed as "nonsense", "philosophically useless", etc. betrays an anti-intellectualism that one does not expect to find in sources that supposedly value intellectual life, I said.

In other words:

"It is good that you are working on this question/problem" = the spirit that supposedly motivates philosophy.

"Your question contains a categorical error and is nonsense" = an anti-intellectual attitude.

A few more examples would be good, to put that hypothesis to the test. Unfortunately my mind is a blank right now as I search for examples of category errors. — andrewk

I am happy to provide a supporting reference, the first example Ryle gives in The Concept of Mind to explain his newly coined term "category-mistake": a visitor being shown around Oxford and told about all the buildings, finally asks his guide, "But where is the University?"

His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if 'the University' stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.

I don't think you'll find category mistakes limited to definite descriptions though.

Perhaps one of the confusions underlying this area is the 'domain of discourse' within which such discussions take place. — Wayfarer

On the one hand, I think there is never not a 'universe-of-discourse', as you put it - and this is the case irrespective of the times or the medium or what-have-you. On the other hand, I think this has become more obvious in recent times, where one can no longer take for granted that someone else shares the same universe of discourse as you — StreetlightX

And I think this is directly relevant to Ryle's original point: that people sometimes ask a question with a mistaken idea about which box they should look in for the answer. (So for Ryle, there's the Cartesian myth that human behaviour is explained by special stuff found in the special box.) But I recently claimed elsewhere that you have to specify a domain -- what else can you do? Look everywhere? At everything?

But it is nevertheless possible to make a mistake in specifying the domain where your question's answer will come from, or to formulate the question in such a way that the answer must come from someplace that it cannot possibly come from. We want some failure-sensitivity, to know when we've gone up a blind alley.

But you have options then: even if you determine there is no answer to your question in this alley, what does that tell you? That the question has no answer? If the question forced you into that alley, you know at least that this formulation of the question yields no answer. But maybe there's a better question to ask, a way to reframe the issue that led to the question. If the question didn't force you into the blind alley, maybe you just made a wrong turn and can take your question elsewhere. I wouldn't expect a sharp distinction there, but they feel different. Failure can instruct in different ways.

For instance, in those two paragraphs I said "the answer" several times and this suddenly looks prejudicial to me. Do you know setting out that your question has only one answer, rather than various answers? Even if you find an answer in Box A, how do you know there's not another, different answer in Box B, and maybe even in Box C?

In the OP @StreetlightX, you talk about running out of sense-making resources, which is nice, and is the kind of failure-sensitivity I had in mind. I think your sense-making is much broader than what I've got here (question reformulation and domain redefinition) but this is just the bits I get from Ryle's original idea.

Something else I remember Ryle saying, though I can never remember where, might be relevant here; it was something like this: there's an idea that philosophy deals with perfectly ordinary questions about really peculiar stuff (minds and such), but actually it deals with really peculiar questions about perfectly ordinary stuff.

This (despite the restricted domain it prescribes) highlights two fourths of what philosophy deals with.The other two fourths is comprised of perfectly ordinary questions about perfectly ordinary stuff, and really peculiar questions about really peculiar stuff. ;)

But the idea common to most is that God is the creator (author) of this world and that God created this world for a purpose (gave it an overarching meaning). — John

The point is that this is an 'idea without content', or rather, an idea-awaiting-content: it is, at best, a kind of placeholder; it holds out the promise of saying something substantial, without, in fact, being anything substantive in itself. And look, I'm not saying you can't elaborate on it, I'm not saying that you can't, in principle, 'fill it out' with some good stuff, all I'm saying is that you didn't - at least, not in that post. Worse still, you attempted to draw some sort of conclusion from this empty statement: "So, it really isn't a question of "category error" at all, but rather a matter of being coherent and consistent in relation to your founding presuppositions". I mean, again, maybe this follows, maybe you have a point to make, but you haven't yet made it. And sure, you can gesture vaguely toward other placeholders ("look, tradition! theology!"), but this is, at best, another placeholding manoeuvre.

Perhaps we can meet a compromise here?: I agree that it's possible to make a great deal of hay out of your placeholders, but as yet, the only hay around belongs to other people.

I am inclined to think that the question "Does God exist?" is nonsense.

But what may be nonsense to me may be the key that opens many doors of understanding and wisdom for others.

Frankly, I think that obsessing with "avoiding" anything or being "sensitive" to anything is intellectually self-defeating, even if we are talking about category mistakes.

The only benefit of an "avoid" or "sensitive" approach that I can think of is efficiency. Well, I suppose if your work is being funded by a grant from a particular source and you are working under deadlines efficiency might be an issue.

But if we are talking about the personal intellectual lives of all individuals efficiency is probably not a goal of many people and any demand for efficiency may take the joy out of the whole process. Even if one later determines that he/she took a "wrong turn" the journey can often still be fascinating, enjoyable, edifying, and rich in wisdom.

What may subjectively be "nonsense" to a lot of people or objectively "nonsense" according to the present prevalent orthodoxy in an intellectual tradition or academic discipline may be the "sense" that one person needs to meet his/her intellectual needs. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I don't know where you're drawing this vocabulary of 'subjective' and 'objective' from. It certainly isn't in my post, and nothing about my post warrants any appeal to orthodoxy or intellectual tradition for the validation of a concept. Indeed what I find so facinating about sense is that it undercuts any simplistic distinction between the subjective and the objective. Sense is always something shifting, mobile, and 'sensitive to conditions', as it were. But there is, for all that, a 'logic of sense' (to borrow the name of Deleuze's book), one internal to sense itself, even as it retains it's own autonomy.

A sensitivity to category mistakes is precisely a 'tool' - perhaps the tool par excellence - that one can use to explore this domain of sense, one that can be used in the service of creatively forging conceptual links between seeming disparate concepts - with the caveat that one 'does the work', as it were, that one does not take for granted that meanings are simply given. So when you say the OP somehow doesnt treat 'grammar and logic' as a tool (notwithstanding the fact that I never even once used the word 'logic'), comes off as utterly bizzare to me. I'm still not convinced that you've read nor understood the point of the OP properly, and it seems you're riding your moralist high-horse a bit too stridently to actually address the OP on its own terms, it seems.

I can see how you might take what I wrote that way, as if the goal were just to avoid mistakes and avoid failure. I don't think I really brought out how much can be learned from finding yourself in a blind alley.

But I don't want to be stuck in one. ("But the answer must be here.") I'm talking about recognizing when you were wrong and getting out to see some more of the world instead of staying in your alley because it's the right alley.

I don't know where you're drawing this vocabulary of 'subjective' and 'objective' from. It certainly isn't in my post, and nothing about my post warrants any appeal to orthodoxy or intellectual tradition for the validation of a concept. Indeed part of what's at stake in it is the celebration or the affirmation of the creativity inherent in the need to forge conceptual links between seemingly disparate concepts - with the caveat that one 'does the work', as it were, that one does not take for granted that meanings are simply given. I'm still not convinced that you've understood the point of the OP, and I think you still think it says something that it doesn't. You seem to be riding your moralist high-horse a bit too stridently to actually engage with the OP on it's own terms, it seems. — StreetlightX

But the OP is prescribing a certain approach to intellectual functioning and saying that the lack of that approach is unacceptable.

I am saying that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to anything intellectual.

If you are simply saying that people need to be more aware of the possibility of category mistakes, that's fine.

But saying that one approach is the bulk of the work in (insert name of tradition/discipline) or one particular thing such as a "sensitivity" is an indispensable or most important tool in doing any intellectual work is severely limiting in an intellectual world full of diverse communication styles, thinking styles, learning styles, intellectual goals, intellectual needs, etc.

You are saying that we need to be sensitive to category mistakes. I am saying that we need to be sensitive to the diversity of intellectual lives/experiences. Maybe I am committing a category mistake, but I think that I really am trying to engage the spirit of your words and show that a category mistake, like any mistake/fallacy/error, does not automatically deserve don't-touch-with-a-ten-foot-pole treatment. I am trying to do the same thing you are trying to do: be a good shepherd of our personal and collective intellectual experiences.

I'm confused as to where you think my OP was meant to be somehow exclusionary of other approaches to things. To affirm the importance of something is not to devalue the importance any anything else, but then, I have no idea why you need this infantile logical point to be explained to you. Perhaps you have a taste for conflict, I dunno, but you certainly seem tilting at windmills to me.

I can see how you might take what I wrote that way, as if the goal were just to avoid mistakes and avoid failure. I don't think I really brought out how much can be learned from finding yourself in a blind alley.

But I don't want to be stuck in one. ("But the answer must be here.") I'm talking about recognizing when you were wrong and getting out to see some more of the world instead of staying in your alley because it's the right alley. — Srap Tasmaner

Do you think that we have done that collectively?

Empirical science has all the answers! The answer must be in physics! Don't waste your time with philosophy, history, art, sociology or theology!

I believe it is what Ken Wilber calls "flatland".

What about in policy? Everybody on every point of the political spectrum seems to make insurance the focal point of the debate over health care in the U.S. The answer must be in distributing insurance the right way! Things like how our culture thrives on behavior that compromises health (for example, the physical and emotional toll of, say, the stress of our extremely competitive, individualistic way of life) are never seen, it seems.

I can see how we can get stuck. I wouldn't focus too much on sensitivity to certain errors/fallacies, though. I would encourage the cultivation of a holistic, multi-disciplinary, multi-tradition way of functioning.

↪WISDOMfromPO-MO I'm confused as to where you think my OP was meant to be somehow exclusionary of other approaches to things. To affirm the importance of something is not to devalue the importance any anything else... — StreetlightX

I can see how asking "What is the meaning of life?" can open a lot of doors to understanding and wisdom for some people. Even if it contains a categorical mistake. Even if nobody is initially sensitive to that categorical mistake and everybody travels down a long road with a dead end.

I can see philosophy being done productively in the absence of some particular "sensitivity".

What is "nonsense" by everybody else's standard may be "sense" to one person.

Even if we could get everybody on the same page semantically, how do we know that any two concepts are commensurable or incommensurable? Just because the concept in your brain that corresponds with a word is incommensurable with the concept in your brain that corresponds with another word does not necessarily mean that the respective concepts in my brain that correspond with those respective words are incommensurable.

It is not about saying what is or is not important. It is about recognizing that not everybody necessarily functions the same way intellectually, that probably neither philosophy nor science can account for all of that variation, and that if there is anything we need to be sensitive to it is the latter.

I think your sense-making is much broader than what I've got here (question reformulation and domain redefinition) but this is just the bits I get from Ryle's original idea. — Srap Tasmaner

Actually, it's pretty useful to bring Ryle in here to clarify some things - he was the original proponent of the 'category mistake' after all: for Ryle, one of the things that specified a 'category' was the set of questions which could be asked of it. Thus asking 'where is the university?' while being shown the library, the rectory, etc, was to commit a category mistake by virtue of asking the wrong kind of question. Thus to understand a category would be to understand the set of questions which can sensically asked of it: in the language of our discussion, it would be that the domain of discourse is specified by the kinds of questions that could be put to the subject at hand. A category mistake is what happens when one asks the wrong questions of things.

Wittgenstein, interestingly, approaches this exact issue from the other side: the PI often asks about 'what sort of answer' or 'what kind of answer' one expects from a certain question (§370, §380, §394), with the implication that questions themselves ought to - depending on the language-game - exhort certain kinds of answers in reply. And as with Ryle, a category mistake can be said to have taken place when the wrong kind of answer is given in response to a certain question ("did you leave the window open?" "but the window is round!" - this answer is 'not even wrong').

The point I guess would be that a category must always be in some way limited: no question can, in principle, accept just any kind of answer least it lose it cogency as a question; similarly, not every kind of question can be put to a specific phenomenon (as per Ryle and the university). This is why there is no 'universal domain of discourse' as it were, and only ever domains of discourse, in the plural.

As far as philosophy goes, this allows for a kind of test for questions: what kind of answer would satisfy that question? And what kind of answer would not? (again, these are Wittgenstein's questions). Importantly this 'test' is not something that can be 'passed' or 'failed' a priori: as I said in a previous post here, it serves as guard-rail in the creative construction of concepts, one which, while not specifying the' right' alleys, helps us avoid the 'wrong' ones (in the same way that a bowling alley guard-rail insures against gutter balls, but does not ensure strikes). It functions critically and negativity, rather than positively.

The point is that the "hay" has already been made by the theological tradition. I'm not here to expound theism; but merely to point out that it is within the context of traditional notions of theism, of God as the bestower of meaning, that the question about the meaning of life is coherent; and not otherwise. It's a pretty simple point, and I'm surprised you seem to be either unable to grasp it, or doggedly unwilling to acknowledge it.

Oh I get it, but it's more or less irrelevant to my initial point, which was that you failed to provide any sort of sense or context for your statement. Pointing to others who have - and not only vaguely, but subsequently to that post, I may add - is a non-sequitur. It's a pretty simple point, and I'm surprised you seem to be either unable to grasp it, or doggedly unwilling to acknowledge it.

You're just being obtuse; the "sense or context" for my statement is the traditional notions of God; if you can't or won't see that that is all I wanted to say, then it is your problem, not mine. It's certainly doesn't constitute a "non-sequitur" to point to what is logically entailed or made coherent by traditional notions. Now, your assertion that it is a non-sequitur: that is a category error!

I agree, you backtracked subsequently in order to shore up your initial bluntly hurled assertion that had no argument nor reference to 'traditional notions of God'. I acknowledge that you fixed your glaringly obvious mistake, post hoc.

I agree, you backtracked subsequently in order to shore up your initial blunt assertion that had no argument nor reference to 'traditional notions of God'. — StreetlightX

OK, but if I made a "mistake" it was that I thought it would have been obvious that the notion of an "author of life who intended it to have meaning" just is the traditional notion of God.

Demonstrate the coherence of those notions! I mean, this was literally the point of the the thread: show your work - among other things. And what do you do? The exact opposite. This is why I was so harsh in my response. You did the very thing the thread was meant to caution against. And in any case even the appeal to 'traditional notions of God' is as straightforward a case of an appeal to authority as there could be. Tradition and theology have said a great many things that are conceptually vacuous (as have many non-theologians of course - I don't discriminate), so it's hardly a philosophical lightning-bolt to say 'well theology has said it makes sense, so it must make sense in the context of theology'. So again, show your work; or, for quite literally the love of God, show someone else's work.

Jesus, man, talk about being pedantic!

If the idea of a "meaning of life" makes sense; it is only in the context of theological notions. It's a huge subject (and is, arguably, ultimately a matter of taste) as to whether theological notions are "conceptually vacuous"; that is whether theological notions themselves make sense. Atheists predictably will say "They don't" and theists will predictably say "they do". The two camps have very different founding assumptions; and mostly end up just taking past one another. In any case the subject is well beyond the scope of this thread.

All I wanted to do was correct the error that consists in saying that the idea of a meaning of life is a category error, by pointing out that it makes logical sense in the context of traditional theological ideas of a transcendent creator and bestower of meaning. If you want to try to demonstrate that those well-known and time-worn theological ideas do not themselves make sense, then I wish you luck. I can virtually guarantee that your arguments will be founded upon assumptions that theologians do not share; that will be the problem you face. How are you going to overcome the fact that you will simply be talking past them; and thus committing a gross category error yourself? Wittgenstein dealt with this common problem with the idea of "language games".