## 1. The Distinction Between Types and Tokens


### 1.1 What the Distinction Is




The distinction between a *type* and its *tokens* is
an ontological one between a general sort of thing and its particular
concrete instances (to put it in an intuitive and preliminary way). So
for example consider the number of words in the Gertrude Stein line
from her poem *Sacred Emily* on the page in front of the
reader's eyes:



> 
> 
> Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.




In one sense of 'word' we may count three different
words; in another sense we may count ten different words. C. S. Peirce
(1931-58, sec. 4.537) called words in the first sense
"types" and words in the second sense "tokens".
Types are generally said to be abstract and unique; tokens are concrete
particulars, composed of ink, pixels of light (or the suitably
circumscribed lack thereof) on a computer screen, electronic strings of
dots and dashes, smoke signals, hand signals, sound waves, etc. A study
of the ratio of written types to spoken types found that there are
twice as many word types in written Swedish as in spoken Swedish
(Allwood, 1998). If a pediatrician asks how many words the toddler has
uttered and is told "three hundred", she might well enquire
"word types or word tokens?" because the former answer
indicates a prodigy. A headline that reads "From the Andes to
Epcot, the Adventures of an 8,000 year old Bean" might elicit
"Is that a bean type or a bean token?".


### 1.2 What It Is Not




Although the matter is discussed more fully in SS8 below, it should
be mentioned here at the outset that the type-token distinction is not
the same distinction as that between a type and (what logicians call)
its *occurrences*. Unfortunately, tokens are often explained as
the "occurrences" of types, but not all occurrences of
types are tokens. To see why, consider this time how many words there
are in the Gertrude Stein line itself, *the line type*, not a
token copy of it. Again, the correct answer is either three or ten, but
this time it cannot be ten word *tokens*. The line is an
abstract type with no unique spatio-temporal location and therefore
cannot consist of particulars, of tokens. But as there are only three
word types of which it might consist, what then are we counting ten of?
The most apt answer is that (following logicians' usage) it is
composed of ten *occurrences* of word types. See SS8 below,
*Occurrences*, for more details.


## 2. Importance and Applicability of the Distinction


### 2.1 Linguistics




It is generally accepted that linguists are interested in types.
Some, e.g. Lyons (1977, p. 28), claim the linguist is interested only
in types. Whether this is so or not, linguists certainly appear to be
heavily committed to types; they "talk as though" there
are types. That is, they often quantify over types in their theories
and refer to them by means of singular terms. As Quine has emphasized,
a theory is committed to the existence of entities of a given sort if
and only if they must be counted among the values of the variables in
order for the statements in the theory to be true. Linguistics is rife
with such quantifications. For example, we are told that an educated
person's vocabulary is about 15,000 *words*, but Shakespeare's
was more nearly 30,000. These are types, as are the twenty-six
*letters* of the English alphabet, and its eighteen cardinal
*vowels*. (Obviously the numbers would be much larger if we
were counting tokens). Linguists also frequently refer to types by
means of singular terms. According to the *O.E.D*., for
example, *the noun 'color'*' is from early
modern English and in addition to its pronunciation [ka'
l@r] has two "modern current or most usual spellings" [colour,
color], eighteen earlier spellings [collor, collour, coloure, colowr,
colowre, colur, colure, cooler, couler, coullor, coullour, coolore,
coulor, coulore, coulour, culler, cullor, cullour] and eighteen senses
(vol. 2, p. 636). According to *Webster's*, *the word
'schedule'* has four current pronunciations:
['ske-(,)ju(@)l], ['ske-j@l] *(US)*,
['she-j@l] (*Can*) and ['she-(,)dyu(@)l]
(*Brit*) (p. 1044). Thus, linguistics is apparently committed
to the existence of these words, which are types.




References to types is not limited to letters, vowels and words, but
occur extensively in all branches of linguistics. Lexicography
discusses, in terms that make it clear that it is types being referred
to, nouns, verbs, words, their stems, definitions, forms,
pronunciations and origins. Phonetics is committed to consonants,
syllables, words and sound segments, the human vocal tract and its
parts (the tongue has five). Phonology also organizes sounds but in
terms of phonemes, allophones, alternations, utterances, phonological
representations, underlying forms, syllables, words, stress-groups,
feet and tone groups. Morphology is apparently committed to morphemes,
roots, affixes, and so forth, and syntax to sentences, semantic
representations, LF representations, among other things. Clearly, just
as words and letters and vowels have tokens, so do all of the other
items mentioned (nouns, pronunciations, syllables, tone groups and so
forth). It is more controversial whether the items studied in
semantics (the meanings of signs, their sense relations, etc.) also
come in types and tokens, and similarly for pragmatics (including
speaker meanings, sentence meanings, implicatures, presuppositions,
etc.) It seems to hinge on whether a mental event (token) or part of
it could be a meaning, a matter that cannot be gone into here. See
Davis (2003) for a view according to which concepts and
thoughts--varieties of meaning--come in types and
tokens.




It is notable that when one of the above types is defined, it is
defined in terms of other types. So for example, sentences might be
(partly) defined in terms of words, and words in terms of phonemes.




The universal and largely unscrutinized reliance of linguistics on the
type-token relationship and related distinctions like that of
*langue* to *parole*, and *competence* to
*performance*, is the subject of Hutton's cautionary book
(1990).


### 2.2 Philosophy




Obviously then, types play an important role in philosophy of
language, linguistics and, with its emphasis on expressions, logic.
Especially noteworthy is the debate concerning the relation between the
meaning of a sentence type and the speaker's meaning in using a
token (a relation that figures prominently in Grice 1969). But the
type-token distinction also functions significantly in other branches
of philosophy as well. In *philosophy of mind*, it yields two
versions of the identity theory of mind (each of which is criticized in
Kripke 1972). The type version of the identity theory (defended by
Smart (1959) and Place (1956) among others) identifies *types*
of mental events/states/processes with *types* of physical
events/states/processes. It says that just as lightning turned out to
be electrical discharge, so pain might turn out to be c-fiber
stimulation, and consciousness might turn out to be brain waves of 40
cycles per second. On this type view, thinking and feeling are certain
types of neurological processes, so absent those processes, there can
be no thinking. The token identity theory (defended by Kim (1966) and
Davidson (1980) among others) maintains that every token mental event
is some token physical event or other, but it denies that a type
match-up must be expected. So for example, even if pain in humans turns
out to be c-fiber stimulation, there may be other life forms that lack
c-fibers but have pains too. And even if consciousness in humans turns
out to be a brain waves that occur 40 times per second, perhaps
androids have consciousness even if they lack such brain waves.




In *aesthetics*, it is generally necessary to distinguish
works of art themselves (types) from their physical incarnations
(tokens). (See, for example, Wollheim 1968, Wolterstorff 1980 and
Davies 2001.) This is not the case with respect to oil paintings like
the *Mona Lisa* where there is and perhaps can be only one
token, but seems to be the case for many other works of art. There can
be more than one token of a sculpture made from a mold, more than one
elegant building made from a blueprint, more than one copy of a film,
and more than one performance of a musical work. Beethoven wrote nine
symphonies, but although he conducted the first performance of
*Symphony No. 9*, he never heard the Ninth, whereas the rest of
us have all heard it, that is, we have all heard tokens of it.




In *ethics*, actions are said to be right/wrong--but is it
action types or only action tokens? There is a dispute about this. Most
ethicists from Mill (1979) to Ross (1988) hold that the hallmark of
ethical conduct is universalizability, so that a particular action is
right/wrong only if it is right/wrong for anyone else in similar
circumstances--in other words, only if it is the right/wrong
*type* of action. If certain types of actions are right and
others wrong, then there may be general indefeasible ethical principles
(however complicated they may be to state, and whether they can be
stated at all). But some ethicists hold that there are no general
ethical principles that hold come what may--that there is always some
circumstance in which such principles would prescribe the wrong
outcome--and such ethicists may go on to add that only particular
(token) actions are right/wrong, not types of actions. See, for
example, Murdoch 1970 and Dancy 2004.


### 2.3 Science and Everyday Discourse




Outside of philosophy and linguistics, scientists often quantify
over types in their theories and refer to them by means of singular
terms. When, for example, we read that the "Spirit Bear" is
a rare white bear that lives in rain forests along the British Columbia
coast, we know that no particular bear is *rare*, but rather a
type of bear. When we are told that these Kermode bears "have a
mutation in the gene for the melanocortin 1 receptor" (*The
Washington Post* 9/24/01 A16) we know that it is not a token
mutation, token gene and token receptor being referred to, but a type.
It is even more evident that a type is being referred to when it is
claimed that "all men carry the same Y chromosome.... This
one and only Y has the same sequence of DNA units in every man alive
except for the occasional mutation that has cropped up every thousand
years" (*The New York Times*, Nicholas Wade 5/27/03).
Similarly, to say the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct is to be
referring to a type, a species. (The status of species will be
discussed in greater detail in SS4 below.)




The preceding paragraph contains singular terms that (apparently)
refer to types. An even more telling commitment to types are the
frequent quantifications over them. Mayr (1970, p. 233), for example,
tells us that "there are about 28,500 subspecies of birds in a
total of 8,600 species, an average of 3.3 subspecies per
species...79 species of swallows have an average of 2.6
subspecies, while 70 species of cuckoo shrikes average 4.6
subspecies". Although these examples come from biology, physics
(or any other science) would provide many examples too. It was claimed
(in the sixties), for example, that "there are thirty particles,
yet all but the electron, neutrino, photon, graviton, and proton are
unstable." Artifactual types (the Volvo 850 GLT, the Dell
Latitude D610 laptop) easily lend themselves to reference also. In
chess we are told that accepting the Queen's Gambit with 2...dc
has been known since 1512, but Black must be careful in this
opening--the pawn snatch is too risky. Type-talk is ubiquitous.


## 3. Types and Universals




Are types universals? They have usually been so conceived, and with
good reason. But the matter is controversial. It depends in part on
what a universal is. (See the entry on
 properties.)
 Universals, in contrast to particulars, have been characterized as
*having instances, being repeatable, being abstract, being acausal,
lacking a spatio-temporal location* and *being predicable of
things*. Whether universals have all these characteristics cannot
be resolved here. The point is that types seem to have some, but not
all, of these characteristics. As should be clear from the preceding
discussion, types have or are capable of having instances, of being
exemplified; they are repeatable. To many, this is enough to count as
universals. With respect to being abstract and lacking a
spatio-temporal location, types are also akin to universals--that
is, they are if universals are. On certain views of types and
universals, types, unlike their instances, are abstract and lack a
spatio-temporal location. On other views, types and universals are
*in* their instances and hence are neither abstract nor
acausal; far from lacking a spatio-temporal location, they usually
have many. (For more details, see SS5 below, *The Relation
between Types and Tokens*.) So far, then, types appear to be a
species of universal, and most metaphysicians would so classify
them. (Although a few would not. Zemach (1992), for example, holds
that there are no universals, but there are types, which are
repeatable particulars--*the cat* may be in many different
places at the same time.)




When it comes to *being predicable*, however, most types
diverge from such classic examples of universals as the property of
*being white* or the relation of *being east of.* They
seem not to be predicable, or at least not as obviously so as the
classic examples of universals. That is, if the hallmark of a
universal is to answer to a predicate or open sentence such as
*being white* answers to 'is white', then most
types do not resemble universals, as they more readily answer to
singular terms. This is amply illustrated by the type talk exhibited
in SS2 above. It is also underscored by the observation that it is
more natural to say of a token of a word--'infinity',
say--that it is a token of the word 'infinity' than
that it is an 'infinity'. That is to say, types seem to
be *objects*, like numbers and sets, rather than properties or
relations; it's just that they are not concrete particulars but
are general objects--abstract objects, on some views. If, then,
we follow Gottlob Frege (1977) in classifying all objects as being the
sort of thing referred to by singular terms, and all properties as the
sort of thing referred to by predicates, then types would be
objects. Hence they would not fall into the same category as the
classic examples of universals such as *being white* and
*being east of*, and thus perhaps should not be considered
universals at all. (Although perhaps all this shows is that they are
not akin to properties, but are their own kind of universal.) A
general exception to what has just been claimed about how we refer to
types (with singular terms) might be inferred from the fact that we do
more often say of an animal that it is a tiger, rather than that it is
a member of the species *Felis Tigris*. This raises the
question as to whether the species *Felis Tigris* is just the
property of *being a tiger*, and if it isn't, then what
the relation between these two items is.




Wollheim (1968, p. 76) insightfully puts the point that types seem
to be objects as that the relationship between a type and its tokens is
"more intimate" than that between (a classic example of) a
property and its instances because "for much of the time we think
and talk of the type as though it were itself a kind of token, though a
peculiarly important or pre-eminent one". He (1968, p. 77)
mentions two other differences worth noting between types and the
classic examples of universals. One is that although types and the
classic examples of properties often satisfy the same predicates, there
are many more predicates shared between a type and its tokens than
between a classic example of a property and its instances.
(Beethoven's *Symphony No. 9* is in the same key, has the
same number of measures, same number of notes, etc. as a great many of
its tokens.) Second, he argues that predicates true of tokens in virtue
of being tokens of the type are therefore true of the type (*Old
Glory* is rectangular) but this is never the case with classic
properties (*being white* is not white.)




These considerations may not suffice to show that types aren't
universals, but they do point to a difference between types and the
classic examples of properties.


## 4. What is a Type?




The question permits answers at varying levels of generality. At its
most general, it is a request for a theory of types, the way set
theory answers the question "what is a set?" A general
answer would tell us what sort of thing a type--any
type--is. For example, is it *sui generis*, or a
universal, or perhaps the set of its tokens, or a function from worlds
to sets, or a kind, or, as Peirce maintained, a law? These options are
discussed in SS4.1. At a more specific level, "what is a
type?" is a request for a theory that would shed some light on
the identity conditions for specific types of types, not necessarily
all of them. It would yield an account of what a word (or a symphony,
a species, a disease, etc.) is. This is in many ways a more difficult
thing to do. To see just how difficult it is to give the identity
conditions for an individual type, SS4.2 considers what a word is,
both because *words* are our paradigm of types, since the
type-token distinction is generally illustrated by means of words, and
because doing so will show that some of the most common assumptions
made about types and their tokens are not correct. It will also
illuminate some of the things we want from a theory of types.


### 4.1 Some General Answers




As mentioned in the previous paragraph, one way a theory of types
might answer the question "what is a type?" is the way set
theory answers the question "what is a set?" If types
*are* universals, as most thinkers assume, then there are as
many theories of types as there are theories of universals. Some
axiomatic theories include Zalta 1983 and Jubien 1988. Since theories
of universals are discussed at length in this Encyclopedia elsewhere,
they will not be repeated here. (See 
 properties.) 
 However it might be said that types are *not* universals for
the reasons mentioned in SS3 above, where it was urged that types
might be neither properties nor relations but objects, and there is an
absolute difference between objects and properties. Identifying types
as universals would appear to fly in the face of that
consideration.


#### 4.1.1 A Set




It might appear that types are better construed as sets (assuming sets
themselves are not universals). The natural thought is that a type is
the set of its tokens, which is how Quine sometimes (1987, p. 218)
construes a type. After all, a species is often said to be "the
class of its members". There are two serious problems with this
construal. One is that many types have no tokens and yet they are
different types. For example, there are a lot of very long sentences
that have no tokens. So if a type were just the set of its tokens,
these distinct sentences would be wrongly classified as identical,
because each would be identical to the null set. Another closely
related problem also stems from the fact that sets, or classes, are
defined extensionally, in terms of their members. The set of natural
numbers without the number 17 is a distinct set from the set of
natural numbers. One way to put this is that classes have their
members *essentially*. Not so the species *homo
sapiens*, the word 'the', nor Beethoven's *Symphony
No. 9.* The set of specimens of *homo sapiens* without
George W. Bush is a different set from the set of specimens of
*homo sapiens* with him, but the species would be the same even
if George W. Bush did not exist. That is, it is false that had George
W. Bush never existed, the species *homo sapiens* would not
have existed. The same species might have had different members; it
does not depend for its existence on the existence of all its members
as sets do.




Better, then, but still in keeping with an extensional set-theoretic
approach, would be to identify a type as a function from worlds to sets
of objects in that world. It is difficult to see any motivation for
this move that would not also motivate identifying properties as such
functions and then we are left with the question of whether types are
universals, discussed in SS3.


#### 4.1.2 A Kind




The example of *homo sapiens* suggests that perhaps a type is
a *kind*, where a kind is not a set (for the reasons mentioned
two paragraphs above). Of course, this raises the question of what a
kind is; Wolterstorff (1970) adopts the *kind* view of types and
identifies kinds as universals. In Wolterstorff 1980, he takes
*being an example of* as undefined and uses it to define
kinds--so that, for example, a possible kind is one such that it is
possible there is an example of it. *Norm kinds* he then defines
as kinds "such that it is possible for them to have properly
formed and also possible for them to have improperly formed
examples" (p. 56). He identifies both species and artworks as
norm-kinds. Bromberger (1992a) also views the tokens of a type as a
quasi-natural kind relative to appropriate projectible ("What is
its freezing point?" e.g.) and individuating questions
("Where was it on June 13th, 2005?"). However,
he doesn't identify the type as the kind itself, since to do so
does not do justice to the semantic facts mentioned in SS2 above, that
types are largely referred to by singular terms. Instead he views the
type as what he calls the *archetype* of the kind, defined as
something that models all the tokens of a kind with respect to
projectible questions but not something that admits of answers to
individuating questions. Thus for Bromberger the type is not the kind
itself, but models all the tokens of the kind. We shall see some
difficulties for this view in SS5 below.


#### 4.1.3 A Law




It wouldn't do to ignore what the coiner of the type-token
distinction had to say about types. Unfortunately it cannot be
adequately unpacked without an in-depth explication of Peirce's
semiotics, which cannot be embarked upon here. (See the entries on
 Charles Sanders Peirce and
 Peirce's theory of signs.)
 Peirce said types "do not exist", yet they are
"definitely Significant Forms" that "determine
things that do exist" (4.423). A type, or "legisign"
as he also calls it, "has a definite identity, though usually
admitting a great variety of appearances. Thus, & *and* and
the sound are all one word" (8.334). Elsewhere he tells us that
a type is "a general law that is a sign. This law is usually
established by men. Every conventional sign is a legisign. It is not a
single object, but a general type which...shall be
significant. ...[E]very Legisign requires Sinsigns"
(2.246). Sinsigns are tokens. (It should be mentioned that for Peirce
there is actually a trichotomy among types, tokens and *tones*,
or qualisigns, which are "the mere quality of appearance"
(8.334).) Thus types have a definite identity as signs, are general
laws established by men, but they do not exist. Perhaps all Peirce
meant by saying they do not exist was that they are "not
individual things" (6.334), that they are, instead what he calls
"generals"--not to be confused with universals. What
he might have meant by a "general law" is
uncertain. Stebbing (1935, p.15) suggests "a rule in accordance
with which tokens ... could be so used as to have meaning
attached to them". Greenlee (1973, p. 137) suggests that for
Peirce a type is "a habit controlling a specific way of responding
interpretatively." Perhaps, then, types are of a psychological nature.
Obviously two people can have the same habit, so *habits* also
come in types and tokens. Presumably, types are then habit types. This
account may be plausible for words, but it is not plausible for
sentences, because there are sentences that have no tokens because if
Ph,Ps are sentences, then so is (Ph & Ps) and it is
clear that for Peirce "every [type] requires [tokens]" (2.246). And it
is much less plausible for non-linguistic types, like types of
beetles, some of which have yet to be discovered.


### 4.2 What is a Word?




No general theory of types can tell us what we often want to know
when we ask: what is a species, a symphony, a word, a poem, or a
disease? Such questions are just as difficult to answer as what a type
is in general. Even if types were sets, for example, set theory by
itself will not answer the burning question of which set a species is.
One would then have to go to biology and philosophy of biology to find
out whether a species is (i) "a set of individuals closely
resembling each other" as Darwin (1859, p. 52) would have it, (ii)
a set of "individuals sharing the same genetic code" as
Putnam (1975, p. 239) would have it, (iii) a set of "interbreeding
natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such
groups", as Mayr (1970, p. 12) would have it, or (iv) a set
comprising "a lineage evolving separately from others and with
its own unitary evolutionary role and tendencies", as Simpson
(1961, p. 153) would have it. Similarly, if there is a question of
copyright infringement, one had best look to industry standards and
aesthetics for what a film or a song is, and not set theory. In
general, questions such as "what is a poem, a phoneme, a disease,
a flag,....?" are to be pursued in conjunction with a
specific discipline, and not within the confines of a general theory of
types. It is largely up to linguistics and the philosophy of it, e.g.,
to determine the identity conditions for phonemes, allophones, cardinal
vowels, LF representations, tone groups and all the other linguistic
types mentioned in SS2 above.


#### 4.2.1 Identity Conditions for Words




It's instructive to consider what our paradigm of a type is--a
word. It will reveal how complicated the identity conditions are for
even one specific type, and help to dispel the idea that tokens are to
types as cookies are to cookie cutters. It will also show what we
desire from a theory of types, by exhibiting the facts that a theory
of types has to accommodate. We illustrated the type-token distinction
by appealing to *words*, so presumably we think we know at
least roughly what a word type is. Unfortunately, everyone seems to
think they know, but there is massive disagreement on the matter in
philosophy. However, as urged in the preceding paragraph, it is
crucial to rely on linguistics when we consider what a word is. When
we do we find that there are different linguistic criteria for what a
word is, and a good deal of the disagreement can be chalked up to this
fact. McArthur 1992's *The Oxford Companion to the English
Language* (pp. 1120-1) lists eight: orthographic, phonological,
morphological, lexical, grammatical, onomastic, lexicographical and
statistical-- but adds that more can be demarcated. *There are
different types of types of words.* However deserving of attention
each of these is, it will be useful to focus on just one, and I will
do so in what follows. There is an important and very common use of
the word 'word' that lexicographers and the rest of us use
frequently. It is, roughly, *the sort of thing that merits a
dictionary entry*. (Roughly, because some entries in the
dictionary, e.g.,'il-,' '-ile,' and
'metric system,' are not words, and some words, e.g. many
proper names, do not get a dictionary entry.) This notion was at play
in our opening remarks in SS2 about Shakespeare's vocabulary
containing 30,000 words, and the twenty spellings and eighteen senses
of the noun 'color'/'colour', the verb
'color'/'colour', and four current
pronunciations of the noun 'schedule'. These examples show
(in this ordinary sense of 'word') that the same word can
be written or spoken, can have more than one correct spelling, can
have more than one correct spelling at the same time, can have more
than one sense at the same time and can have more than one correct
pronunciation at the same time. It also shows that different words can
have the same correct spelling and pronunciation; further obvious
examples would show that different words can have the same
sense--e.g. English 'red' and French
'rouge'. A theory of types, or of word types, that cannot
accommodate this notion of a word is worthless. In what follows, I
shall use 'word' in this sense.


#### 4.2.2 What a Theory of Words Might Tell Us




Ideally, a theory of words and their tokens should tell us not only
(i) what a word is (in the sense indicated), but (ii) how a word is to
be individuated, (iii) whether there is anything all and only tokens of a
particular word have in common (other than being tokens of that word);
(iv) how we know about words; (v) what the relation is between words
and their tokens; (vi) what makes a token a token of one word rather
than another; (vii) how word tokens are to be individuated; and (viii)
what makes us think a particular is a token of one word rather than
another. These questions are distinct, although they are apt to run
together because the answer to one may give rise to answers to others.
For example, if we say in answer to (iii), that all tokens of a
certain word (say, 'cat') have something in common besides
being tokens of that word--*they are all spelled
'c'-'a'-'t'*, for
example--then we may be inclined to say to (vi) that
*spelling* makes a word token a token of 'cat'
rather than some other type; and to (vii) that word tokens of
'cat' are to be individuated on the basis of their being
spelled 'c'-'a'-'t'; and to (viii)
that we think something is a token of 'cat' when we see
that it is spelled 'c'-'a'-'t';
and to (ii) that the word 'cat' itself is to be
individuated by its spelling; and to (i) that a word type is a
sequence of letters--e.g. the word 'cat' just
*is* the sequence of letters <'c',
'a', 't'>; and to (iv) that we know about a
particular word, about what properties it has, by perceiving its
tokens: it has all the properties that every one of its tokens has
(except for properties types cannot have, e.g., *being
concrete*).


#### 4.2.3 Orthography




The advantage of starting with (iii) is that if there is some
nontrivial property that all tokens of a word (in the sense indicated)
have in common, then perhaps we can use it to individuate the tokens,
and also to get a handle on what the type is like and on how we know
what the type is like. Unfortunately, it is not spelling, contrary to
what many philosophers seem to think. Stebbing, e.g., considers the
inscribed word a *shape.* But not even the linguist's much
narrower notion of an *orthographic word* ('a visual sign
with a space around it') requires a canonical spelling. We have
seen that not all tokens of 'color' have the same
spelling, even when they are spelled correctly, which they sometimes
are not. Not all tokens are spelled at all--spoken tokens are
not. Moreover, two words can have the same spelling, as the noun
'color' and verb 'color' prove, or to take a
different example, the noun 'down' from German meaning
"the fine soft covering of fowls" and the different noun
'down' from Celtic meaning "open expanse of elevated
land". (They are not the same word with two senses, but different
words with different etymologies.) Notice that even if, contrary to
fact, all tokens of a word had the same spelling and we concluded that
the word type itself just is the sequence of letter types that compose
it, we would have analyzed word types in terms of letter types, but
since we are wondering what types are in the first place, we would
still need an account of what letters are since they are types
too. Providing one is surprisingly difficult. Letters of the alphabet
such as the letter 'A' are not just *shapes*, for
example, contrary to what is implicit in Stebbing 1935 and more
explicit in Goodman and Quine 1947, because Braille and Morse code
tokens of the letter 'A' cannot be said to have "the
same shape", and even standard inscriptions of the letter
'A' do not have the same shape--in either a Euclidean
or a topological sense--as these examples obtained from a few
minutes in the library illustrate:



> 
> ![letter A forms](fig-a.jpg)
> 




Moreover, the letter 'A' has a long history and many of
its earlier "forms" would not be recognizable to the modern
reader.


#### 4.2.4 Phonology




If we switch instead to a *phonemic* analysis of words, as
being more fundamental, similar problems arise. Not all tokens of a
word are composed of the same *phonemes*, because some tokens
are inscriptions. But even ignoring inscriptions, the example of the
two 'down''s shows that neither can we identify a
word with a sequence of phonemes. This particular difficulty might be
avoided if we identify a word with a phonemic analysis paired with a
sense. But this is too strong; we saw earlier that the noun
'color' has eighteen senses. Moreover,
'schedule' has more than one phonemic analysis. A phoneme
itself is a type with tokens, and so we'd also need an account of what
a phoneme is, and what its tokens have in common (if anything). Saying
what a phoneme is promises to be at least as hard as saying what a
letter is. Phonology, the study of phonemes, is distinct from
phonetics, the scientific study of speech production. Phonetics is
concerned with the physical properties of sounds produced and is not
language relative. Phonemes, on the other hand, are language relative:
two phonetically distinct speech tokens may be classified as tokens of
the same phoneme relative to one language, or as tokens of different
phonemes relative to another language. Phonemes are theoretical
entities, and abstract ones at that: they are sometimes said to be
*sets of features*. The bottom line is that the
*phonological* word is not the lexicographical one either.




It might be thought that we started at too abstract a level--that
if we think there is a hierarchy of types of words, we started "too
high" on the hierarchy and we should start lower on the
hierarchy. That is, that we should first gather together those tokens
that *are* phonetically (and perhaps semantically) identical on
the grounds that this is a perfectly good notion of a
*word*. But notice: this would mean that different dialects of
the same language would have far fewer "words" in common than one
would have supposed, and it would misclassify many words because, for
example, according to Fudge (1990, p. 39) a Cockney 'know'
is like the Queen's 'now'; the Queen's 'know'
is like Scottish 'now'; and a Yorkshire 'know'
is like the Queen's 'gnaw'. Worse, even within the very
same idiolect it would distinguish as different "words" what one would
have thought were the same word. For example, the word
'extraordinary' is variously pronounced with six, five,
four, three or even two syllables by speakers of British English.
According to Fudge (1990, p. 40) it ranges "for most British English
speakers from the hyper-careful
['ekstr@'?o:dIn@rI] through the fairly
careful [Ik'stro:dnrI] to the very colloquial
['stro:nrI]." That is, the very same person may use any of
five pronunciations for what should be considered the same word. Only
an absolute diehard of this "bottom-up" approach would insist on
distinguishing as different words representations for the same
idiolectal word. Not only would a phonologist take this as excessively
complicated, but the representation types themselves can receive
realizations that are acoustically very different (for the small child
and the man may speak the same idiolect). Fudge (1990, p. 31) assures
us that "It is very rare for two repetitions of an utterance to be
exactly identical, even when spoken by the same person." Pretty soon,
each word token would have to count as tokens of different
"words".




The example of ['stro:nri] demonstrates that there may be
*no* phonetic signal in a token for every phoneme that is
supposed to compose the word: it is "missing" several syllables! This
is also demonstrated by reflection on casual speech: [jeet?] for
'did you eat?'. No wonder, then, that many phoneticians
have given up on the attempt to reduce phonological types to
acoustic/articulatory types. (See Bromberger and Halle 1986). Even the
physicalist Bjorn Lindblom (1986, p. 495) concedes that "for a given
language there seems to be no unique set of acoustic properties that
will always be present in the production of a given unit (feature,
phoneme, syllable) and that will reliably be found in all conceivable
contexts."




However, the final nail in the coffin for the suggestion according to
which all tokens of the same word have the "same sound" is that words
can be mispronounced. As Kaplan (1990) has argued, a word can suffer
extreme mispronunciation and still be (a token of) the same word. He
asks us to imagine a test subject, who faithfully repeats each word
she is told. After a time, we put filters on her that radically alter
the results of her efforts. Nonetheless, we would say she is saying
the word she hears. Kaplan concludes that differences in sound between
tokens of the same word can be just about as great as we would
like. Notice that in such circumstances *intention*--what
word the test subject intended to produce--is key. This suggests
that perhaps what all tokens of a word, say, 'color', have
in common is that they were produced as the result of an intention to
produce a token of the word 'color'. Unfortunately,
counterexamples are not hard to manufacture. (A clear phonemic example
of 'supercalifragilisticexpealadocious' in English would
probably not count as a token of 'color', for example.)
Counterexamples aside, it would be putting the cart before the horse
to try to explain what the word 'color' is by appealing to
the intention to produce a token of the word 'color'. It
would be like trying to explain what a fork is by appealing to the
intention to produce a fork. Intentions are important in helping to
identify which type a token is a token of--question
(viii)--but will not help us with what the type is--question
(i)--and so I shall ignore them in what follows.


#### 4.2.5 Conclusion




The upshot of all this is that there is no nontrivial, interesting,
"natural", projectible property that all tokens of a word have in
common, other than being tokens of that word (in the sense of
'word' indicated). Tokens are all the same word, but they
are not all the same. That is, the answer to (iii) is no. What then,
of the other questions, (i)-(viii)? They become more difficult to
answer. Wetzel (2002) attempts to answer them. The primary conclusion
of Wetzel 2002 is that words are *theoretical* entities,
postulated by and justified by linguistic theory. Words, in the sense
indicated, are individuated by a number of variables, including
orthography, phonology, etymology, grammatical function and
sense(s). As for their tokens, they are apt to have some but not all
of the properties of the type. And, as the story from Kaplan shows,
tokens may even be quite deformed. These considerations impact
significantly on the relation between types and their tokens,
discussed in the next section, SS5.


## 5. The Relation between Types and their Tokens




The relation between types and their tokens is obviously dependent on
what a type is. If it is a set, as Quine (1987, p. 217) maintains, the
relation is *class membership*. If it is a kind, as
Wolterstorff maintains, the relation is *kind-membership*. If
it is a law, as Peirce maintains, it is something else again, perhaps
*being used in accordance with*. (Although Peirce also says a
token is an "instance" of a type and that the token
signifies the type.) Nonetheless, it has often been taken to be the
relation of *instantiation, or exemplification*; a token is an
instance of a type; it exemplifies the type. (Not that every instance
of a type is a token--e.g. capital 'A', small
'A', and all the other types of 'A's tokened
in the display in SS4.2 above may be said to be instances of the
letter 'A'.) As with other universals, there are two
versions of this relation, Platonic and Aristotelian. Although the two
versions of property realism are discussed at length under this
encyclopedia's entry for properties, a few remarks about the type
versions are in order.




According to Platonic versions of type realism, e.g., Bromberger 1989,
Hale 1990, Katz 1981 and Wetzel 2002, the type is an abstract object,
not located anywhere in space-time, although its tokens are. This
version appears to give rise to serious epistemological
problems--we don't see or hear the type, it isn't located
anywhere in space-time, so how do spatiotemporal creatures such as
ourselves know it exists, or what properties it has? Admittedly, we
see and hear tokens, but how are they a guide to what the type is
like? One answer, given for example, by Wolterstorff, for whom we saw
in SS4 that a type is a norm-kind, is that ordinary induction from
tokens would give us knowledge of types, at least in the case of
instantiated types. Bromberger (1992a, p.176) claims that linguists
"often impute properties to types after observing and judging
some of their tokens and seem to do this in a principled way"
and calls the principle that licenses this inference the *Platonic
Relationship Principle.* More specifically, he proposes (1992a)
that the type, as the archetype of the quasi-natural kind which
comprises the tokens, has just those projectible properties that all
the tokens have. He has in mind properties such as the same underlying
phonological structure, for words, and the same boiling point, for
elements.




However, as we saw in SS4, generally there are no such properties
had by all and only tokens of a type, at least in the case of
words--not same phonological structure, nor same sense nor same
spelling. Not all tokens have any such natural projectible property
(*except* for the property of being tokens of the same
type). It should be clear from SS4 that the cookie cutter
model--the idea of the type as just a perceptible pattern for
what all the tokens look like--does not work. Goodman (1972,
pp. 437-8) follows Peirce in using the word 'replica' to
apply to all tokens of the same type, (although Peirce seemed to think
they were replicas of the type, whereas Goodman, being a nominalist,
cannot think this) but not all tokens resemble each other in any
ordinary sense beyond being tokens of the same type (although of
course some do). Goodman himself is clear about this, for he notes
there that "Similarity, ever ready to solve philosophical
problems and overcome obstacles, is a pretender, an impostor, a
quack.... Similarity does not pick out inscriptions that are
'tokens of a common type', or replicas of each other. Only
our addiction to similarity deludes us into accepting similarity as
the basis for grouping inscriptions into the several letters, words,
and so forth." But others, e.g. Stebbing (1935, p. 6) and Hardie
(1936), claim that all spoken tokens are more or less similar to each
other. Because they are not, Wetzel (2002) and (2008) proposes that
since the only property all the tokens of a type generally share is
being tokens of the type, one of the primary justifications for
positing word types is that being a token of the word
'color,' say, is the glue that binds the considerable
variety of space-time particulars together. The type is thus a very
important theoretical object, whose function is to unify all the
tokens as being "of the same type"; in accordance with the
Platonic Relationship Principle, the type has properties based on the
properties of *some of* its tokens, but in a complex
way--in addition, the tokens have some of *their*
properties in virtue of what properties the type has.




In Aristotelian versions of exemplification, such as Wollheim 1968 and
Armstrong 1978, the type has no independent existence apart from its
tokens. It is "in" each and every one of its tokens, and
so can be seen or heard just as the tokens can be. This avoids the
epistemological problem mentioned in the preceding paragraph, but
makes it hard to explain how some types--such as very long
sentences--can have no tokens.




As against instantiation of any sort, Stebbing (1935, p. 9) argues
that a token is not an instance of a type, because "the type is
a logical construction out of tokens having similarity or conventional
association [as the inscribed word with the spoken]. It follows that
the type is logically dependent upon the tokens, in the sense that it
is logically impossible to mention the type-word without using a
token, and further, the meaning of the type has to be defined by
reference to the tokens." These claims are quite
controversial. For example, it is clear one can refer to a type word
without using a token *of it*--one can say "the word
a token of which is the first word on the page".




Another alternative to *exemplification* is
*representation*. According to Szabo (1999, p. 150), types are
abstract particulars, as with Platonic realism, but tokens
*represent* their types, just as "paintings, photographs,
maps, numerals, hand gestures, traffic signs and horn signals"
represent, or "stand for" their representata. A word token
of 'horse' represents the word 'horse', which
in turn represents horses. Just as a correct map of the planet can
provide us with knowledge of the planet, so too a token can provide us
with knowledge of properties of the type, thus addressing the
epistemological problem. The representation view gives rise to a
problem however, for it turns out that what we have been calling word
tokens aren't words at all on this view, anymore than a map of a
planet is a planet, and this runs contrary to our usual thinking.


## 6. What is a Token?




It might seem that tokens are less problematic than types, being
spatio-temporal particulars. But certain complications should be
noted. (We continue to use linguistic examples, but the remarks hold
true for tokens generally).


* As Kaplan (1990, p. 97) pointed out, a token of a word could be
suitably circumscribed empty space (e.g., in a piece of cardboard
after letters have been cut out of it).
* It would seem that a token might also be a mental
particular--because a poem might be composed prior to its being
read or written down--although there is disagreement over whether
such a mental particular is to count as a token.
* It will generally be the case that some tokens of the type
resemble in their outward physical appearance some other tokens of the
type, but as we saw in SS4-5, it is generally not the case that
*all* the tokens of the same type resemble one another in
appearance. (Recall the example of the letter 'A' in
SS4.)
* Even being similar in appearance (say by sound or spelling) to a
canonical exemplar token of the type is not enough to make a physical
object/event a token of that type. The phonetic sequence [Ah
'key ess 'oon ah 'may sah] is the same phonetic
(type) spoken in Spanish or Yiddish. Yet if a Spanish speaker uses it
to say *a table goes here*, she has not, in addition, said
*a cow eats without a knife* in Yiddish. She has not said
anything in Yiddish, however phonetically similar what she said might
be to a sentence token of Yiddish. So her token is a token in Spanish,
not Yiddish. Meaningful tokens are tokens in a language.
* Along the same lines, being a physical object/event that is
similar in appearance (say by sound or spelling) to a canonical
exemplar token of the type is not even enough to make the physical
object/event *meaningful*, because, as Putnam (1981, pp. 1-2)
among others has argued, the token must have been appropriately
intentionally produced.
* If it is not already clear from the foregoing, it should be noted
that a physical object that is a token of a type is not one
*intrinsically*--merely by being a certain sequence of
shaped ink marks, say. Just as being a brother is not an intrinsic
property of brothers because one is a brother only relative to another
person, so a token is a token only relative to a type, and to a
language, perhaps to an orientation, and perhaps, as Hugly and Sayward
(1981 p. 186) have argued, to a tokening system (e.g., Morse Code),
which they define as "a set of instructions that tell how, for
any given expression, a speaker of the language could construct a
perceptible particular that tokens that expression given that the
speaker had enough physical and mental resources...".


## 7. Do Types Exist?


### 7.1 Universals




Since types are usually thought to be universals, the debate over
whether they exist is as longstanding as the debate over universals,
and debaters fall into the same camps. Realists say they do, as we saw
in SS5 which surveyed several varieties of realism. Realism's
traditional opponents were nominalists and
conceptualists. Nominalists, who renounce universals and abstract
objects, say they don't. (See, e.g., Goodman and Quine 1947, Quine
1953, Goodman 1977 and Bromberger 1992b). Conceptualists argued that
there are no general things such as the species *homo sapiens*;
there are only general *ideas*--that is, ideas that apply
to more than one thing. Applied to words, the thesis would be that
words are not abstract objects "out there", but objects in
the mind. Their existence then, would be contingent on having been
thought of. While this contingency may have a good deal of
plausibility in the case of linguistic items, by itself conceptualism
is just a stopgap measure on the issue of types and tokens
generally. For ideas themselves are also either types or tokens (as
evidenced by the fact that two people sometimes have the same
idea). So either the conceptualist is proposing that types are idea
types--which would be a species of realism--or she is
proposing that there are no types, only mental idea particulars in
particular persons, which is a version of nominalism. Conceptualism,
therefore, will be ignored in what follows.


### 7.2 Realism




Realism is the most natural view in the debate with nominalism,
because as we saw in some detail in SS2 type talk is
ubiquitous. That is, we talk as though there are types in philosophy,
science and everyday life. To say that we talk as though there are
types is not to invoke the traditional argument for universals, which
is that a sunset and a rose are both red, so they have something in
common; and this something can only be the property of *being
red*; so properties exist. Quine (1953) convinced many at
mid-century that this traditional argument for universals, which
relies on predicates referring to something, fails. He objected that
"the rose is red because the rose partakes of redness" is
uninformative--we are no better off in terms of explanatory power
with such extra objects as *redness* than we are without them;
perhaps a rose's being red and a sunset's being red are just brute
facts. Rather, to say we talk as though there are types is, as we saw
in SS2, to appeal to the fact that in our theories we frequently
use singular terms for types, and we quantify over them. As we saw,
Frege emphasized that singular term usage is in indicator of
*objecthood*, and Quine stressed that we are ontologically
committed to that over which we quantify. Such considerations led
Quine himself (1987, p. 217) to hold that expression types such as
'red' exist, even while he denied that *redness*
does. Since at least on the face of it we are committed to types in
many fields of inquiry, therefore, it is incumbent upon the nominalist
to "analyze them away". (Or to maintain that all theories
which appear to refer to types are false--but this is a pretty
radical approach, which will be ignored below.)


### 7.3 Nominalism




Realism is not without its problems, as was noted in SS5
above. Also favoring nominalism is Occam's principle which would have
us prefer theories with fewer sorts of entities, other things being
equal. The main problem for nominalists is to account for our
apparent theoretical commitment to types, which, whatever types are,
are not spatio-temporal particulars (according to nearly
everyone). Traditional nominalists argued (as their name implies) that
there are no general things, there are only general *words*,
and such words simply apply to more than one thing. But this is not a
solution to the current problem, presupposing as it does that there
are word types--types are the problem. (Attempts to avoid this
are given by Goodman and by Sellars; see below.) So-called class
nominalists hold that a word type is just the class, or set, of its
tokens. But this is unsatisfactory because, first, as we saw in
SS5, classes are ill-suited for the job, since classes have their
membership and their cardinality necessarily, but how many tokens a
type has is usually a contingent matter. (For the same reason,
mereological sums of tokens are unsuited for the job of types, as they
have their *parts* essentially.) And second, classes are
abstract objects too, so it is hard to see how this is really a form
of nominalism about abstract objects at all.




Initially more promising is the nominalistic claim that the surface
grammar of type talk is misleading, that talk of types is just
shorthand for talk of tokens and is thus harmless. To say 'The
horse is a mammal' is just to say 'All horses are
mammals'; to say 'The horse is a four-legged animal'
is to say, as Frege himself (1977) suggested, 'All properly
constituted horses are four-legged animals'. The idea is to
"analyze away" apparent references to types by offering
translations that are apparently type-free, and otherwise
nominalistically acceptable. The problem is how to do this for each
and every reference to or quantification over a type/types. Given the
ubiquity of such references/quantifications, only the procurement of
some sort of systematic procedure could assure us it can be done.
However, chances of formulating a systematic procedure appear slight,
in view of the following obstacles that would have to be overcome.


* If the "translation" is not to turn out to be
trivially true because there are no tokens, it must be the case that
all types have tokens. We saw in SS5 there is reason to deny this,
because it would falsify the law of syntax that says that if
Ph,Ps are sentences, then so is (Ph & Ps), since there
are only finitely many sentence tokens.
* The examples of 'The horse is a mammal' and 'The
horse is four-legged' suggest that 'The Type is P'
is to be analyzed as 'All tokens, or all normal tokens, are
P'. But this won't work. The noun 'colour' is
spelled 'color' (among other ways) , but not all properly
formed tokens of it are. 'Colour' also means *of the
face or skin* (among other things), but not only do not all tokens
of it mean *of the face or skin*, probably most do not, and the
average one does not.
* These semantic facts show that 'The Type is P' cannot
be analyzed as 'Either all tokens are P, all properly formed
tokens are P, most tokens are P or the average token is P'. Nor
is there any point in searching for some other magic statistical
formula that *would* express exactly how many tokens have to be
P for the Type to be P. This is because some of the properties of the
Type are collective properties--e.g., when it is said that
"The grizzly bear, *Ursus Horribilis*, had at one time a
U.S. range of most of the West, and numbered 10,000 is California
alone, but today its range is Montana, Wyoming and Idaho and it
numbers less than 1000." Having a range of most of the West is
true of no individual bear.
* It is very difficult even to find a nominalistic paraphrase for
"Old Glory had twenty-eight stars in 1846 but now has
fifty", as Wetzel (2008) argues.
* So far we have only been considering analyzing away singular
terms. Quantifications are indeed a nightmare. Here is Quine and
Goodman's (1947 p. 180) nominalized version of "There are more
cats than dogs": "Every individual that contains a bit of
each cat is bigger than some individual that contains a bit of each
dog" where a bit "is an object that is just as big as the
smallest animal among all cats and dogs". Ingenious though their
strategy is, it offers no help for nominalizing "Of 20,481
species examined, two-thirds were secure, seven percent were
critically imperiled, and fifteen percent were vulnerable".


#### 7.3.1 Goodman's Nominalism




I have been writing as though it were easy to pick out and quantify
over tokens of a type without referring to the type. Sometimes it is:
'The horse...'-- 'All
horses...'. But this will not generally be the
case. Consider the noun 'color'. The natural way to pick
out its tokens is "all tokens of the noun
'color'", but obviously this will not do as a
nominalistic paraphrase, for it contains a reference to a
type. Goodman (1977) suggests a systematic way of paraphrasing and a
general procedure for substituting nominalistic paraphrases for
linguistic type-ridden sentences. In 1977 (p. 262) he claims that
"any " 'Paris' consists of five letters"
is short for "Every 'Paris'-inscription consists of
five letter-inscriptions" ". The idea seems to be to
replace singular terms by predicates, which nominalists such as
Goodman think carry no ontological commitment. So instead of "an
inscription of 'color'" write "a
'color'-inscription." It seems pretty clear,
however, that, based on the rules of quote-names for words, this
predicate still retains a singular term for a type, the word
'color' just as clearly as "a George W. Bush
appearance" still contains a reference to Bush. That this is so
is even more obvious in the case of "an 'a cat is on the
mat'-inscription". So the question is how we might
identify these tokens grammatically but without referring to the noun
'color' itself and still say something true and (in some
appropriate sense) equivalent. Is there perhaps some other way of
quantifying over tokens of a word, without referring to the word or to
any other type? The fact that tokens are all "the same
type" suggests they are all "the same" somehow,
which begets the idea that the type must embody certain
*similar* features that all and only its tokens have, such as
spelling, or sense, or phonological structure or some combination of
them. This is a beguiling idea, until one tries to find such a
feature, or features, amid the large variety of its tokens--even
the well-formed tokens. As we saw in SS4, there is no such feature
(consider again 'color' and 'schedule'). They
demonstrate that e.g. neither same spelling, same sense, nor same
pronunciation prevail. In any event, such possible defining features
involve reference to types: letter types in the spellings, phoneme
types in the pronunciation. These too would have to be "analyzed
away" in terms of quantifications over particulars. It might be
thought that Sellars solved this problem by appealing to the notion of
a *linguistic role*, which Loux (1998, p. 79) defines as:
two word (tokens) have the same linguistic role if they
"function in the same way as responses to perceptual input; they
enter into the same inference patterns; and they play the same role in
guiding behavior". It is dubious whether this notion can be
unpacked without referring to abstract objects (same inference
patterns?), but in any event it cannot be used to pick out all tokens
of a word, as we have been using the word 'word'. The
reason is that 'red' and 'rouge' are different
words in our sense, but their tokens play the same linguistic role for
Sellars.




But even if expressions like "a
'color'-inscription" did not contain singular terms,
Goodman's suggestion that whatever is true of the type is true of all
the tokens has two fatal defects. First, it would turn truths into
falsehoods. 'Paris' consists of five letters, as does
'color', but not every 'color'-inscription
consists of just five letter-inscriptions since some are spelled
'c'-'o'-'l'-'o'-'u'-'r'.
(As for denying that these are inscriptions of the word
'color' see "Orthography" in SS4 above.)
It doesn't even work for the word 'Paris', as it has the
forms 'Pareiss' and 'Parrys' also. Second,
Goodman's technique of replacing singular terms by predicates only
works if we are employing a realist semantics. That is, the key to his
program is that for every word in the dictionary and every sentence in
the language there corresponds a unique predicate that is true of just
the tokens of that word/that sentence. (Without such predicates, true
statements apparently referring to types would be short for nothing at
all.) But this is only plausible on a realist semantics. If
'predicate' meant 'predicate token' there
would not even be enough predicates for every word in the dictionary,
much less every sentence in the language. That is, it is certainly
false that for every word a in the dictionary, there is an
actual predicate token of the form 'is an
a-inscription'. For more details on the problems with
Goodman's strategy, see Wetzel (2000).


#### 7.3.2 Sellars's nominalism




Sellars's suggestion is rather similar to Goodman's, and faces similar
difficulties, but is sufficiently different to be worth
mentioning. Loux (1998, pp. 75-83), for one, argues that Sellars
(1963) achieves the best nominalist account available by overcoming
critical objections to Carnap's "metalinguistic" account
as follows. Carnap (1959, pp. 284-314) had suggested that all claims
involving apparent reference to abstract objects, such as "Red
is a color", are systematically to be understood as
metalinguistic claims about the word involved ("The word
'red' is a color predicate"). There are two obvious
objections to Carnap's suggestion. The first is that we still have
word types being referred to; the second is that translation of
"Red is a color" and "The word 'red' is
a color predicate" into French, say, will not result in
sentences that are equivalent, since the latter ("Le mot
'red' est un predicat de coleur") will still
refer to an English word, but the former will not. To counter the
first objection, Sellars (1963, pp. 632-33) claims "the word
'red'" is a *distributive singular term*,
which typically consists of 'the' followed by a common
noun that purports to name a kind--e.g., 'the lion'
in "The lion is tawny"--and that use of it results in
a generic claim that is about token lions, not the
type--"All lions are tawny"--since "The K
is f" is logically equivalent to "All Ks are
f". Note that this is similar to Goodman's suggestion and as
such is subject to the same criticism as is Goodman's: the two
sentence forms said to be logically equivalent are not. See the second
bullet point three paragraphs above. Nor is there some other simple
and straightforward logical equivalence that does the job; see the
third and fourth bullet points above. At best this is a suggestion
that some of the sentences in question--the ones that do not
contain "collective" predicates like
'extinct'--are logically equivalent to generic
claims--e.g. "Lions are tawny"--which are
capable of being true while admitting of exceptions. However, that
there is a uniform semantics (even a very complex one) for generic
claims, one moreover that "analyzes away" kind talk, is a
strong empirical claim about language, one that does not receive
strong support from current efforts to analyze generic claims. (See
Carlson and Pelletier 1995.)




To counter the second objection (about non-equivalent translations)
Sellars suggests we introduce a new sort of quotation device, dot
quotation, that would permit translation of the quoted word. Then,
e.g. "The word *red* is a color predicate"
translates as "Le mot *rouge* est un predicat
de coleur". The justification is that 'red' and
'rouge' are functionally equivalent--they play the
same linguistic role. As mentioned above, this means that they have
the same causes (of perceptual stimuli, e.g.) and effects (conduct,
e.g.) and function similarly in inferential transitions. Again,
whether Sellars can unpack the notion of "same linguistic
role" without appealing to any universals remains an open
question. Less open is the question of how successful such an approach
is to dealing with talk of words, e.g., "The word
'red' consists of three letters". If we apply
Sellars' analysis systematically, this becomes ""The word
'red'" consists of a three-lettered predicate"
which is just false; if instead we reckon that "the word
'red'" is already a distributive singular term and
apply his analysis to it, getting "The word *red* is a
three-lettered predicate", this then translates incorrectly as
"Le mot *rouge* est un predicat trois-en
lettres". If we stick instead with regular quotation, which
resists translation, then we cannot appeal to "same linguistic
role" to say what class of things "the word
'red'" distributes over. In any event, Sellars's
account also faces the difficulty noted above with Goodman's account:
it is only plausible on a realist semantics, because if
'predicate' meant 'predicate token' there
would not even be enough predicates for every word in the dictionary,
much less every sentence in the language. (For other problems with
Sellars's account, see Loux 1978: 81-85.)


## 8. Occurrences




As mentioned in SS1 above, there is a related distinction that
needs to be mentioned in connection with the type-token
distinction. It is that between a thing, or type of thing, and (what
is best called) an *occurrence* of it--where an occurrence
is not necessarily a token. The reason the reader was asked above to
count the words in Stein's line *in front of the reader's
eyes*, was to ensure that tokens would be counted. Tokens are
concrete particulars; whether objects or events they have a unique
spatio-temporal location. Had the reader been asked to count the
words in Stein's line itself, the reader might still have correctly
answered either 'three' or 'ten'. There are
exactly three word types, but although there are ten word tokens in a
token copy of the line, there aren't any tokens at all in the line
itself. The line itself is an abstract type, as is the poem in which
it first appeared. Nor are there ten word types in the line, because
as we just said it contains only the three word types,
'a,' 'is' and 'rose,' each of
which is unique. So what are there ten of? *Occurrences* of
words, as logicians say: three occurrences of the word (type)
'a,' three of 'is' and four of
'rose'. Or, to put it in a more ontologically neutral
fashion: the word 'a' occurs three times in the line,
'is' three times and 'rose' four times.
Similarly, the variable 'x' occurs three times in the
formula '[?]x (Ax & Bx)'.




Now this may seem impossible; how can one and the same thing occur
more than once without there being two tokens of it? Simons (1982)
concludes that it can't. Wetzel (1993) argues that it is useful to
distinguish objects from occurrences of them. For example, in the
sequence of numbers <0,1,0,1> the very same number, the number
one, occurs twice, yet its first occurrence is distinct from its
second. The notion of *an occurrence of x in y* involves not
only x and y, but also how x is situated in y. Even a
*concrete* object can occur more than once in a
sequence--the same person occurs twice in the sequence of New
Jersey million dollar lottery winners, remarkably enough. If we think
of an *expression* as a sequence, then the air of mystery over
how the same identical thing can occur twice vanishes. Does this mean
that, in addition to word types and word tokens, word occurrences must
also be recognized? Not necessarily; we can unpack the notion of an
occurrence using "occurs in" if we have the notion of a
sequence available; see Wetzel 1993 for details.




The need to distinguish tokens of types from occurrences of types
arises, not just in linguistics, but whenever types of things have
other types of things occurring in them. There are 10,000 (or so)
notes in Beethoven's *Sonate Pathetique*, but there are
only 88 notes (types) the piano can produce. There are supposed to be
fifty stars (types) in the current *Old Glory* (type), but the
five-pointed star (type) is unique. And what could it mean to say that
the very same atom (type), hydrogen, "occurs four times"
in the methane molecule? Again, the perplexing thing is how the very
same thing can "occur" more than once, without there being
more than one token of it. Armstrong (1986), Lewis (1986a,b) and
Forrest (1986) called such types "structural universals",
which were the subject of a debate among the three. Armstrong and
Forrest defended Armstrong's (1978) view of universals against Lewis,
who delineated seven different views of structural universals
compatible with Armstrong's theory, and found all of them wanting.
Basically, Lewis (1986a) assumed that there are two sorts of ways
structural universals might be constructed of simpler universals:
set-theoretically and mereologically. He argued that set-theoretical
constructions resulted in ersatz universals, not universals worthy of
the name, and that the various mereological constructions just
resulted in a heap of simpler universals, where there could not be
*two* of the simpler universals. Wetzel (2008) argues that
there is a conception of a structural universal, the "occurrence
conception"--which is an extension of the occurrence
conception of expressions mentioned above--that escapes Lewis's
objections.