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An Ontology of Words

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Abstract

Words are indispensable linguistic tools for beings like us. However, there is not much philosophical work done about what words really are. In this paper, I develop a new ontology for words. I argue that (a) words are abstract artifacts that are created to fulfill various kinds of purposes, and (b) words are abstract in the sense that they are not located in space but they have a beginning and may have an end in time given that certain conditions are met. What follows from this two-fold argument is that words, from an ontological point of view, are more like musical works, fictional characters or computer programs, than numbers or sets.

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Notes

  1. See for example, Kaplan (1990, 2011), Katz (2000), Wetzel (2009), and the following papers mostly as responses to Kaplan’s paper: McCulloch (1991), Hawthorne and Lepore (2011) and Bromberger (2011).

  2. For similar accounts about these objects see Levinson (1980), Thomasson (1999), Irmak (2012).

  3. This is not to claim that Wetzel’s account of types could do without the notion of occurrence. For further discussion on occurrence see Wetzel (2009).

  4. I use the following notation to distinguish words from various word instances: Strings of letters (a) in italics, i.e. red, stand for words themselves, (b) in single quotes, i.e. ‘red’, stand for an inscription, a written instance, (c) in slashes, i.e. /red/, stand for an utterance of the word.

  5. This is also the sense in which Kaplan (1990), Wetzel (2009), Hawthorne and Lepore (2011) use the word in their work.

  6. See Hilpinen (2012) for Peirce’s theory of types and tokens.

  7. Wollheim (1963, 67) defends a similar view where he uses what he calls “transmitted properties” to distinguish types from universals.

  8. One can find various passages in Wetzel’s work, such as the following one, that seem to support this reading: “Many, perhaps all, of a type’s spatiotemporal properties are had in virtue of spatiotemporal properties of its tokens. The species has a range in virtue of where its members are located, but it is not itself “at” that location (Wetzel, 151).”

  9. More on this point below. See also Levinson (1980) for an argument against Platonism about musical works on the same grounds.

  10. Kaplan, in response to Hawthorne and Lepore, claims that this metaphysical reading is not intended in his paper (Kaplan 2011).

  11. Lee Walters (2013), for example, argues that there are created types. In particular, he defends an ontological view that takes repeatable artworks as created types. “The claim that repeatable artworks are types which are created constitutes the barebones of a type-creationist treatment of repeatable artworks, a treatment that can be fleshed out in numerous ways (Walters, 462).” I take it that Walters defends the same view for linguistic entities, including words, which makes our views quite similar, at least in terms of the above criteria: Creation and Change. My hesitance to classify words as types is mostly due to the common (and perhaps mistaken) perception in metaphysics that types are necessarily eternal abstract entities (more on this below).

  12. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

  13. For a very good survey of various proposals see Rosen (2001).

  14. See Lewis (1986) for a discussion on what he calls the Way of Negation.

  15. I defended this view in Irmak (2012). Others have defended a similar view for musical works and fictional entities. See, for example, Levinson (1980) and Thomasson (1999).

  16. Note that I have the printed copy in mind here.

  17. See Deutsch (1991), Dodd (2000), Uidhir (2012).

  18. See, for instance, Howell (2002), Trivedi (2008), Walters (2013).

  19. For various surveys and discussions on ontological dependence see Tahko and Lowe (2015), Koslicki (2013).

  20. See Correia (2008) for different interpretations of (EOD).

  21. For instance, if (EOD) expresses a rigid existential dependence then the existence and the identity of a word rigidly depends on particular entities and state of affairs. If, on the other hand, one prefers more coarse-grained conditions of individuation and existence, (EOD) can be taken as a generic existential dependence, where the existence of a word does not depend on any particular object or a state of affairs. See Thomasson (1999), Koslicki (2013), Tahko and Lowe (2015), and Correia (2008) for such decisions and their consequences with respect to different kinds of objects, properties and state of affairs.

  22. Katz (138) seems to adopt a similar response in his discussion of Bob Hale’s objection to Platonist account of language change (Hale 1987, 49).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank an anonymous referee for their detailed comments. For their helpful feedback on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Amie Thomasson, Simon Evnine, Ned Markosian, Dan Korman, Linda Wetzel, Jennifer Wang, Carrie Jenkins, Irem Kurtsal Steen, Harry Platanakis, Ilhan Inan, and Kenneth Westphal. I would also like to thank Georgia Axiotou for her invaluable help and support.

Funding

Funding was provided by Bogazici University Research Fund (Grant No. 10321SUP).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Boğaziçi University, 34342, Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

    Nurbay Irmak

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Irmak, N. An Ontology of Words. Erkenn 84, 1139–1158 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0001-0

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