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    Word types are legitimate theoretical objects whose prima... — Carmelics
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    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    Word types are legitimate theoretical objects whose primary function is to unify tokens that share no common perceptible property

    Philosophy of Language
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The only property all tokens of a word type generally share is being tokens of that type
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    • 2.Being a token of a given word type is the glue that binds a considerable variety of space-time particulars together
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    • 3.One of the primary justifications for positing word types is that they unify tokens that otherwise share no natural projectible property
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Nominalists like Quine and Nelson Goodman argue that positing abstract unifying objects violates ontological parsimony when functional equivalents exist.
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    • 2.Inscription types in Goodman's calculus of individuals unify tokens via concrete syntactic shape-predicates, making abstract word types theoretically redundant.
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    • 3.The claim that tokens 'share no common perceptible property' ignores that syntactic equivalence classes grounded in physical similarity relations perform the same unificatory work without Platonist commitments.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Wittgenstein's family resemblance model shows that tokens can be unified by overlapping perceptible similarities without any single shared property.
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    • 2.If family resemblance suffices to unify game-tokens under 'game', it suffices to unify word-tokens without positing abstract types as theoretical objects.
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    Philosophy of Language

    Related

    Being a token of a given word type is the glue that binds a considerable variety...If family resemblance suffices to unify game-tokens under 'game', it suffices to...Inscription types in Goodman's calculus of individuals unify tokens via concrete...Nominalists like Quine and Nelson Goodman argue that positing abstract unifying ...
    +4 moreShow less
    One of the primary justifications for positing word types is that they unify tok...The claim that tokens 'share no common perceptible property' ignores that syntac...The only property all tokens of a word type generally share is being tokens of t...Wittgenstein's family resemblance model shows that tokens can be unified by over...

    Similar

    One of the primary justifications for positing word types is that they...84%Without tokens to derive representational features from, uninstantiate...84%Predicative types inherit their representational features from both th...83%The cookie cutter model of types — the idea that a type is a perceptib...83%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: types-tokens
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    However, as we saw in §4, 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 §4 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)
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