Biological taxon names are descriptive names
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Biological taxon names are descriptive names Jerzy A. Brzozowski1
Received: 21 October 2019 / Accepted: 3 June 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The so-called ‘type method’ widely employed in biological taxonomy is often seen as conforming to the causal-historical theory of reference. In this paper, I argue for an alternative account of reference for biological nomenclature in which taxon names are understood as descriptive names (the ‘DN account’). A descriptive name, as the concept came to be known from the work of Gareth Evans, is a referring expression introduced by a definite description. There are three main differences between the DN and the causal account. First, according to the DN account, rather than fixing a name to a referent, the assignment of a type specimen to serve as the name-bearer for a taxon should be seen as performatively establishing a synonymy between a name and a definite description of the form “the taxon whose type is t”. Each taxon name is therefore associated with a criterion of application, a semantic rule that establishes the connection between the name and the descriptive content. This is the second major difference from the causal account: taxon names do have some descriptive content associated with them. The final locus of dissent concerns the strength of the modality resulting from the usage of taxon names. In order to address this point, I use the DN account to focus on the debate between Matt Haber and Joeri Witteveen concerning misidentification of type specimens, misapplication of names, and the truth conditions of Joseph LaPorte’s de dicto necessary sentence “Necessarily, any species with a type specimen contains its type specimen”. Using a pragmatic variant of the distinction between attributive and referential uses of descriptions, I argue that a metalinguistic version of the de dicto sentence is in fact falsified, as previously argued by Haber.
* Jerzy A. Brzozowski [email protected] 1
Departamento de Filosofia, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil
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Keywords Biological taxonomy · Descriptive names · Theories of reference · Type method · Rigid designation · Criteria of application
1 Introduction This paper discusses the role of the type method in biological taxonomy and how it is accounted for under different theories of reference in philosophy of language. The type method is the cornerstone of all rank-based biological nomenclature codes.1 At the species level, the type method is the procedure whereby a particular organism (or part of an organism, multiple organisms, etc.)—called a type specimen—of a purported species is formally designated as the name-bearer for the species’ name. That is, regardless of how the actual boundaries of the species turn out to be, whichever organisms happen to be conspecific with the nomenclatural type specimen will share that species name (Witteveen 2015, 2016). The type method is commonly thought to give support to the claim tha
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