ABSTRACT

In this chapter the authors show that if there are things that can change, it must be possible to apply the concept of some things being qualitatively identical but numerically distinct. They argue for this possibility from a different starting point, that of the means of communication. The type-token distinction is basic to all methods of communication. The authors resolve this difficulty by talking in the first case about word-tokens, in the second case about word-types. If each occurrence of a word counts separately, they are concerned with word-tokens; if all the occurrences of the same word count only for one, they are concerned with word-types. Although the type-token distinction can in this way be applied elsewhere, its paradigm application is in language. For a language must consist of words or symbols, so understood that different speakers on different occasions can utter or recognize some sound or shape as being the same word or the same symbol.