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lukeprog comments on Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline - Less Wrong
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Fair enough; it's a magical category in one sense, and not a magical category in another sense.
In what sense is it a magical category?
Would it qualify as ironic if "magical categories" turned out to be a member of the set of all sets that contain themselves as members?
I'm not sure I believe in non-magical categories.
I guess what is ironic is that if "magical categories" are themselves magical, we could never know that they are.
Further, not knowing the meaning of a magical category (not even knowing if the meaning is knowable) it is possible that the set of all sets that contain themselves is magical.
I'm trying to guess from the context, but I think that being a magical category means that there is no universal algorithm that could be applied to determine if an object x is contained within it. Suppose that this is the definition and that being a magical category strongly means that there is also no algorithm to determine if an object x is not contained within it.
All this to quip that if magical categories are magical, then they are contained in the set of all sets containing themselves. If magical categories are strongly magical, they are contained in and contain the set of sets containing themselves. (Since using the property of strongness, it would be impossible to determine if the set-of-sets-containing-themselves are magical or not, making the set-of-sets-containing-themselves magical.)