captious, category mistake, mild-mannered

Person of the Year: Ben Bernanke

The story of the year was a weak economy that could have been much, much weaker. Thank the man who runs the Federal Reserve, our mild-mannered economic overlord

mild-mannered

IN BRIEF: adj. - Behaving in or having a gentle disposition.

cap·tious (kăp'shəs)


adj.

1. Marked by a disposition to find and point out trivial faults: a captious scholar.
2. Intended to entrap or confuse, as in an argument: a captious question.

[Middle English capcious, from Old French captieux, from Latin captiōsus, from captiō, seizure, sophism, from captus, past participle of capere, to seize.]

[形]((文))

1 あら捜しする；口うるさい, 意地の悪い.

2 相手をわなにかける, 揚げ足取りの.

captiously cap'tious·ly adv.
captiousness cap'tious·ness n.

 category mistake

A notion prominent in the work of Ryle. A category mistake arises when things or facts of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another. Someone would make a category mistake if after being shown all the battalions and regiments she wished to be shown the army. Ryle believed that a Cartesian theory of mind depended on the category mistake of reifying mental events, instead of seeing mental descriptions as just one kind of description of persons and their dispositions. Thinking of beliefs as in the head, or numbers as large spatial objects, or God as a person, or time as flowing, may each be making category mistakes.