Category Mistakes and the Status of Truth and Evil

I was just watching one of those year in review pieces that run on cable news this time of year. One of the clips featured John McCain answering a question posed by Pastor Rick Warren during Warren's dual interviews with McCain and Obama last August. Warren asked McCain if evil existed and, if so, how should it be dealt with? McCain agreed that evil existed and insisted that it must be defeated.

Seeing this clip reminded me of a philosophical article written by Gilbert Ryles on the topic of category mistakes. Ryles' point, if I am recalling the article correctly, is that clear thinking requires us to assign things to their proper ontological categories. Confused thinking is often the result of our ontological category mistakes - mistakes in which we think of a specific kind of thing as something that it is not.

(If you don't know the meaning of "ontological," look it up. My blog will not empower intellectually lazy bums expecting to be spoonfed. :)

Category mistakes can have deadly consequences. Consider our ill conceived "war on terror." That moniker treats "terror" as a foe when terror is unmistakably a tactic. You can no more wage war on terror than you can on any other tactic or method. But that didn't stop us from invading Iraq in the belief that Iraq would become "the central front in the war on terror." $600,000,000,000 and hundreds of thousands dead people later, we still haven't straightened out this confusion.

McCain's answer demonstrates another common category mistake. It treats "evil" as an entity that can be fought and defeated. But evil is not an entity, or even an attribute. Evil is an evaluative status - a judgment if you will. When we say that something or someone is "evil," we are offering an extremely negative moral assessment of an act or person. We're not describing a force or entity that needs to be confronted and walloped.

We make the same mistake when we speak of "truth." We tend to think of truth as a thing to be sought or obtained. What we're actually seeking when we search for truth (or "the truth") is an accurate understanding of reality - or some particular aspect of reality. Truth is the status or judgment that we assign to claims or beliefs that we think accurately describe reality. This is confirmed by the fact that beliefs and claims are the only types of things that can be true (or false).

[I'm sure someone will point out that we often speak of "true friends" and even "the true church." While these are somewhat different uses of the word "true"
the core idea of faithfulness is still operative. A true friend is a faithful friend. The true church (if there is such a thing) would be the chuch that remained faithful in doctrine and devotion. True statements are statements that are faithful to reality].

I should add that I don't believe in "biblical truth" in so far as that phrase suggests that a statement or belief is true because it is asserted in scripture. A statement is true or false depending on its relationship to reality, not because it is asserted in a book - even when that book is the Bible. In my opinion, the word "biblical" in the phrase "biblical truth" doesn't add anything - it doesn't do any conceptual work.

Why am I writing about this? I don't know. I had a point but seem to have forgotten what it was. I guess category mistakes just irritate me.

So don't fight evil; fight evil people! And think clearly!

Joe H.