Departamento de Filosofia, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2020 Jun 26;42(3):29. doi: 10.1007/s40656-020-00322-1.
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.
所谓的“类型方法”在生物分类学中被广泛应用，通常被认为符合参照的因果历史理论。在本文中，我主张为生物命名法提供一种替代的参照理论，其中分类单元名称被理解为描述性名称（“DN 理论”）。正如加雷思·埃文斯（Gareth Evans）的工作所表明的那样，描述性名称是通过限定描述引入的指称表达式。DN 理论与因果理论有三个主要区别。首先，根据 DN 理论，不是将名称固定到一个指称物上，而是将一个模式标本分配给一个分类单元作为名称承载者，应该被视为在名称和限定描述之间建立了一种同义关系，其形式为“其模式标本为 t 的分类单元”。因此，每个分类单元名称都与一个应用标准相关联，即一个语义规则，它建立了名称与描述性内容之间的联系。这是与因果理论的第二个主要区别：分类单元名称确实与一些描述性内容相关联。最后一个分歧点涉及到使用分类单元名称所产生的模态强度。为了解决这个问题，我使用 DN 理论来关注马特·哈伯（Matt Haber）和乔里·维特文（Joeri Witteveen）之间关于模式标本的错误识别、名称的错误应用以及约瑟夫·拉波特（Joseph LaPorte）的“必然地，任何具有模式标本的物种都包含其模式标本”这一表述的真条件的争论。通过对描述的属性和指称用法之间的区别的语用变体的使用，我认为，正如哈伯之前所主张的那样，元语言版本的 de dicto 句子实际上是被证伪的。
