  The most natural way to develop a pragmatic account of category mistakes is to appeal to Grice’s maxims of conversation. According to Grice’s maxim of quality, one ought not to assert what one believes to be false. Since atomic category mistakes are  arguably trivially  false[24],  it seems obvious to participants in the conversation that the speaker is uttering something that they do not believe, violating the maxim. Thus unless the speaker is interpreted as attempting to communicate something other than the literal content of the sentence (e.g. a metaphorical meaning), the utterance would be infelicitous.