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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Word types are legitimate theoretical objects whose primary function is to unify tokens that share no common perceptible property

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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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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    Strongest counterpoint
    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.