Occurrences of sentences that are traditionally considered category mistakes, such as ‘The red number is divisible by three’, tend to elicit a sense of oddness in assessors. In attempting to explain this oddness, existing accounts in the philosophical literature commonly claim that occurrences of such sentences are associated with a defect or phenomenology unique to the class of category mistakes. It might be thought that recent work in experimental psycholinguistics—in particular, the recording of event-related brain potentials (patterns of voltage variation in the brain)—holds the potential to shed new light on this debate. I review the relevant experimental results, before arguing that they present advocates of accounts of category mistakes with a dilemma: either the uniqueness claims should be rejected, or the experimental technique in question cannot be used to test existing accounts of category mistakes in the manner that philosophers might hope.

传统上被认为是类别错误的句子的出现，例如“红色数字可以被三整除”，往往会引起评估者的奇怪感。在试图解释这种奇怪现象时，哲学文献中的现有叙述通常声称此类句子的出现与类别错误类别特有的缺陷或现象学有关。人们可能认为，实验心理语言学的最新工作——特别是记录与事件相关的大脑电位（大脑中电压变化的模式）——有可能为这场争论提供新的线索。我回顾了相关的实验结果，然后认为它们使类别错误的支持者陷入了困境：要么拒绝唯一性主张，