  The very fact that category mistakes have such figurative uses is not in itself a problem for the meaninglessness view: prima facie, there is no contradiction between the claims that, when taken literally, category mistakes are meaningless while when used figuratively, they can be meaningful. However, figurative uses of speech clearly have some connection to their literal meanings, with different theories offering different accounts of this connection. The question then becomes, for each such account of figurative uses, whether it requires the relevant sentence to also be literally meaningful.