  Even without offering an explicit definition, there is a phenomenological way of characterizing category mistakes. As noted at the outset, there seems to be a distinctive kind of infelicity which we can recognize by example: the sort of infelicity present in paradigmatic category mistakes such as ‘The number two is blue’. We can thus characterize category mistakes as sentences that are infelicitous in a similar manner to these paradigmatic examples. While this kind of phenomenological characterization may not seem theoretically informative, on reflection it reveals several interesting features of category mistakes. First, category mistakes can be created using a wide range of syntactic types: for example, adjectives (‘Two is green’); adverbs (‘John sleeps furiously’); or prepositional phrases (‘The theory of relativity is under the table’). Second, the infelicity characteristic of category mistakes seems to occur in a range of complex constructions (for example, ‘The number two isn’t blue’ or ‘Either the number two is blue or it is prime’). Third, whether the sort of infelicity in question is present can depend on context, in various different ways. For example, an utterance of ‘That is green’ seems infelicitous in a context where the demonstrative refers (or appears to refer) to the number two, but entirely innocuous in a context in which it refers to a pen. And an utterance of ‘The priest is pregnant’ can be infelicitous in a context where speakers assume that all priests are male, but entirely innocuous in a context where it is assumed that there are female priests. As we shall see, these features play a role in the ensuing debate.