  Philosophers seem to have been interested in the phenomenon of category mistakes at least since Aristotle, even if the phenomenon was not explicitly labelled. For example, In Metaphysics Zeta 5, Aristotle raises an interesting puzzle concerning the attribute ‘snub’: on the one hand, ‘snub nose’ seems to mean exactly the same thing as ‘concave nose’ which suggests that ‘snub’ simply means the same as ‘concave’. On the other hand, this cannot be the entire story because, unlike ‘concave’, ‘snub’ can only be felicitously attributed to noses: ‘concave bowl’, for example, is entirely felicitous while ‘snub bowl’ is a  kind of category  mistake.[1]