Suppressing Synonymy with a Homonym: The Emergence of the Nomenclatural Type Concept in Nineteenth Century Natural History

Abstract

Abstract. 'Type' in biology is a polysemous term. In a landmark article, Paul Farber (Journal of the History of Biology 9(1): 1976) argued that this deceptively plain term had acquired three different meanings in early nineteenth century natural history alone. 'Type' was used in relation to three distinct type concepts, each of them associated with a different set of practices. Important as Farber's analysis has been for the historiography of natural history, his account conceals an important dimension of early nineteenth century 'type talk.' Farber's taxonomy of type concepts passes over the fact that certain uses of 'type' began to take on a new meaning in this period. At the closing of the eighteenth century, terms like 'type specimen,' 'type species,' and 'type genus' were universally recognized as referring to typical, model members of their encompassing taxa. But in the course of the nineteenth century, the same terms were co-opted for a different purpose. As part of an effort to drive out nomenclatural synonymy -the confusing state of a taxon being known to different people by different names -these terms started to signify the fixed and potentially atypical name-bearing elements of taxa. A new type concept was born: the nomenclatural type. In this article, I retrace this perplexing nineteenth century shift in meaning of 'type.' I uncover the nomenclatural disorder that the new nomenclatural type concept dissolved, and expose the conceptual confusion it left in its tracks. What emerges is an account of how synonymy was suppressed through the coinage of a homonym.

Typological thinking: Then and now

“…ENDNOTES 1 This focus on recovering a forgotten original dimension of the typology/population distinction differentiates my approach from other reformist analyses of the typology/population distinctions, for example in application to the difference between character and character-state evolution (Brigandt, 2007) or as involving different strategies of idealization and periodization (DiTeresi, 2010;Love, 2009). 2 See Dubois (2005) and Witteveen (2016b) for details on this nomenclatural "type method." 3 The distinction was first proposed by Hennig (1969) and was developed (and given its current name) by Jefferies (1979).…”

Objectivity, Historicity, Taxonomy

“…14). The exact reasons for this ''delay'' in the application of the type method to species names need not concern us here (but see Witteveen (2016) for details). In any case, in the wider taxonomic literature the notion of a namebearing type specimen had already been making the rounds since the earlynineteenth century.…”

Verbalizing phylogenomic conflict: Representation of node congruence across competing reconstructions of the neoavian explosion

“…We have shown elsewhere that Linnaean homonymy and synonymy relationships are unreliable indicators of congruence when constraints such as parent coverage are involved in establishing a concept's referential extension [14,26,32]. Indeed, Code-enforced Linnaean naming is purposefully and productively designed to fixate the meaning of names by ostension, while allowing the intensional components to remain ambiguous [21,54,55,56,57]. Yet this trade-off effectively shifts the burden of disambiguating varying intensionalities associated with Linnaean names onto an additional, interpreting agent -typically human experts.…”