An Ontology of Words

On the individuation of words

“…That is, we need to provide criteria of identity for word-types which allow us to individuate words such that it can be the case that two particular word-instances are instances of the same word-type (on the assumption that there are such types). One solution, recently further developed by Irmak (2018), holds that words are individuated by their history. In this paper, I argue that this view either fails to account for our intuitions about word identity, or is too vague to be a plausible answer to the problem of word individuation.…”

“…It should be noted that such vagueness in the notion of 'sufficient similarity' is not unique to history, but is common to many of the proposals for word individuation. Versions of the same problem have been argued as being sufficient to reject the attempt to individuate words through their shape or form (Wetzel 2009;Hawthorne and Lepore 2011;Irmak 2018), through meaning (Irmak 2018), and through the intentions of speakers (Cappelen 2000). If we accept, as most have, such an issue to be enough to lead us to reject those other proposals, then it would seem that it should be enough to reject history too.…”

“…Perhaps the most defended view in the metaphysics of words are those views that posit genuinely existing word-types. Such views can be further split into the platonists that take word-types to be eternal abstract entities (Katz 1981, Wetzel 2009; and views that take word-types to be abstract artefacts (Irmak 2018). Despite various differences between these versions of type-realist views of words, most prominently concerning whether words are created or eternal entities, they agree that what is it for two particular wordinstances or tokens to be the same word is for them to both be instances of the same type.…”

A bundle theory of words

“…Debates in the metaphysics of language have largely focused on two interrelated issues. First, whether words are particular objects composed of stages (Kaplan 1990(Kaplan , 2011, or are abstract types or kinds, either as Platonic kinds (Katz 1981;Wetzel 2009), or artifactual kinds (Hawthorne and Lepore 2011;Irmak 2018); and, second, how to individuate words, with the focus being about whether we can do so through phonetic, orthographic, or semantic properties, or through the word's history/origin (see Miller 2019 for a critique of these attempts).…”

A pluralistic theory of wordhood

“…10 10 Among those championing a lineageist approach to word individuation or defending views sympathetic to it in important respects, see Alward (2005), Cappelen and Dever (2001), Devitt (1983), Millikan (1984, 2005), Richard (1990), Sainsbury and Tye (2012), Sainsbury (2015), and Irmak (2019). To be sure, the theories in this list hardly make up a homogeneous front, and differ in a number of aspects.…”