Posted: Nov 06, 2021 7:48 am
From the fields of ontology and epistemics the assertion that a tomato is a lump of coal is what is known as a 'category mistake' (or category error).
Here is a quick outline:
https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Category_error
As far as I understand some of the ontology, the difference between your two examples is not one of degree, but one of kind.
Interestingly enough, there may be a category error in your original question, in that you speculate that 'wrongness' might have the quality of being gradable whereas, in pure terms, gradability is not a quality that can be ascribed to the concept 'wrong'.
Of course in conversational terms, we can apply gradability to utterances that have multiple components, and entailements and implicatures.
If a class of 100 students take a test and 100 students pass the test then the two utterances
a) All of the students passed the test
and
b) Some of the students passed the test
can both be said to be 'true', but (a) is "truer" than (b).
The speaker of (b) is not wrong per se but he/she failed to apply the Gricean maxim of quantity which enjoins participants to 'make your contribution as informative as is required.'
Language is not logic.
Here is a quick outline:
https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Category_error
As far as I understand some of the ontology, the difference between your two examples is not one of degree, but one of kind.
Interestingly enough, there may be a category error in your original question, in that you speculate that 'wrongness' might have the quality of being gradable whereas, in pure terms, gradability is not a quality that can be ascribed to the concept 'wrong'.
Of course in conversational terms, we can apply gradability to utterances that have multiple components, and entailements and implicatures.
If a class of 100 students take a test and 100 students pass the test then the two utterances
a) All of the students passed the test
and
b) Some of the students passed the test
can both be said to be 'true', but (a) is "truer" than (b).
The speaker of (b) is not wrong per se but he/she failed to apply the Gricean maxim of quantity which enjoins participants to 'make your contribution as informative as is required.'
Language is not logic.