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Biological taxon names are descriptive names

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Throughout this paper, I will use the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), hereafter ‘the Code’, as the main source for the illustration of rules, but the other relevant nomenclature codes are the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (ICNP), and the International Code of Virus Classification and Nomenclature (ICVCN). ‘ICZN’ is also the acronym for the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. If it is not clear from the context, I will refer to this as ‘the Commission’.

  2. I do not challenge the causal account about ordinary proper names, nor do I dispute the thesis of rigid designation in general; in fact, my DN account will assume the rigidity of names of nomenclatural types themselves. An overarching point of this paper will be that the semantic and pragmatic behaviors of taxon names differ significantly from those of ordinary names.

  3. I must forefront that I am not claiming that a taxon name is an abbreviated definite description, nor a rigidified definite description; see Kanterian (2009) for arguments against those views of descriptive names.

  4. References are to the online version of the code, which can be accessed at www.iczn.org.

  5. The concept of ‘nominal taxon’ appears in the ICZN but not in other codes of nomenclature. The concept is useful to account for cases in which, for example, a subspecies receives a name, but is later discovered to be only a population of its species. This is in line with the idea that “taxon names are taxonomic hypotheses” (Haber 2012, 780).

  6. Curiously, however, Hull (1978, 355) went as far as suggesting that a Wittgensteinian ‘cluster definition’—which is precisely a target of Kripke’s critique—could in principle hold for biological taxon names.

  7. For Hull on possible worlds, see his (1984), where he writes approvingly of Kitcher (1982), who in turn recasts the causal theory without mentioning the term ‘possible world’ at all.

  8. LaPorte (2004) rejects the individuality thesis, whereas Devitt (2008) seems agnostic about it. Both of them wholeheartedly endorse the Kripkean metaphysical apparatus and argue that notions such as de re necessity (as manifest in essentialism) can help explain some phenomena related to biological nomenclature. Like Ghiselin and Hull, I reject essentialism about biological taxa, but to belabor that point would take us beyond the scope of this article. There is an exchange between Ghiselin and Kevin de Queiroz that touches on this issue: see de Queiroz (1995, 1994, 1992) and Ghiselin (1995). Sober (1980) conjectures whether, if species are individuals, they can be subjected to Kripke’s arguments for the essentiality of origin. Pedroso (2012, 2014) argues convincingly that they cannot.

  9. The qua-problem results from acknowledging that an act of ostension is irredeemably indeterminate, so that it is never clear what is the intended referent of a name fixed by such act. For example, when Osborn described T. rex, if one claims that the concept of ‘species’ played no part in the process, it is not clear whether he was attaching the name to that specimen qua organism, or to the species to which that organism belongs, or yet to the genus Tyrannosaurus, etc. Devitt and Sterelny (1999, 75–76) famously attempt an amended theory, suggesting that a baptism is not a single, unique event, but rather a process that involves ‘multiple groundings’ for a name. See Haber (2012, footnote 6) for an alternative solution that involves the application of theoretical concepts such as the species concept.

  10. N.b., in the actual world — this will turn out to be crucial for LaPorte’s (2003) solution of the paradox.

  11. Witteveen disagrees with LaPorte’s evaluation of the truth conditions for the de re sentence. Witteveen argues that, if we read ‘the type specimen of taxon S’ non-rigidly, as a definite description, then the de re sentence mentioned in the text does not require the type specimen to be the same in every possible world (2015, 577). However, if we accept Haber’s (2012, 772) formalization of the de re and the de dicto sentences in modal logic, Witteveen’s ‘non-rigid de re’ reading turns out to have truth conditions equivalent to Haber’s de dicto formula, and the original de re formula still requires the type specimen to be the same in all possible worlds accessible from the world in which the formula is being evaluated (the actual world, for that matter). Witteveen may have in mind either a different conception of de re modality (see Mackie 2006, chap. 1), or a system of modal logic with contingent indentity (see Priest 2008, chap. 17).

  12. The complete ICZN names of these subspecies are as follows. California Red-Sided Garter Snake: Thamnophis sirtalis infernalis, de Blainville 1835; San Francisco Garter Snake: Thamnophis sirtalis tetrataenia, Cope, E.D., in Yarrow, H.C. 1875.

  13. This seems to echo the way Kripke wrote about ‘Neptune’, but there is room for controversy here: see Kanterian (2009, 410n). Marga Reimer (2004) calls descriptive names ‘descriptively introduced names’. On Reimer’s account, the descriptive content of descriptively introduced names ceases to play a semantical role once its referent comes to be known by acquaintance. I would like to suggest that perhaps biological taxa can never be known by acquaintance.

  14. Dawkins (2004) provides a pageant of such names: ‘Concestor 0’, ‘Concestor 1’, etc.

  15. Concerning the ‘appropriate rank’ construction in this schema, it should be noted that this is filled in by the conventions encoded in the orthography of the names themselves. We know, for instance, that T. s. infernalis is a subspecies just from the fact that it has three names, i.e. a trinomen (ICZN, Article 5.2).

  16. Of course, the development of a full-blown modal system featuring this operator is beyond the scope of this paper. Given that a criterion of application is a rule, I envision the system to be one of deontic modal logic.

  17. But see Härlin and Sundberg (1998) for an attempt.

  18. Again, in order for the discovery to happen, Boundy and Rossman must have made use not only of criteria of application, but also of a criterion of identity for subspecies.

  19. This utterance has at least implicitly been made by any of the several conservation publications mentioned by Barry et al. (1996) or Barry and Jennings (1998), such as the 1993 World checklist of threatened amphibians and reptiles. At that time, T. s. tetrataenia (intended as the peninsular taxon) was listed as ‘threatened’, whereas T. s. infernalis (intended as coastal) was not.

  20. I thank an anonymous referee for pointing out the need for clarification here.

  21. Whether (11) can be attributed to Boundy and Rossman (1995) is beside the point.

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Acknowledgements

First, I would like to thank Gustavo Caponi for supervising this research in its earliest stages, while it was still a PhD dissertation, and also in its latest, as a post-doc project. During those early days, conversations with Makmiller Pedroso helped change my mind about essentialism, to which I am grateful. I also would like to thank attendants of the “Species in the Age of Discordance” Conference (23–25 March 2017) at the University of Utah, especially Celso Neto, Justin Bzovy, Leonard Finkelman and Richard Javier Stephenson for their encouraging remarks. My stay as a visiting scholar at University of Utah’s Department of Philosophy during April and May 2018 proved instrumental in writing this paper. An early version of it received careful reading and insightful comments by Carlos Santana, Dan Molter, Matt Haber and Richard Figueroa, which lead to great improvements. Finally, I thank Italo Lins Lemos for inspiration. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001. Finantial support was also provided by The National Science Foundation (Award #1557117, “Evolution and the Levels of Lineage”); The University of Utah Department of Philosophy; and by The University of Utah Center for Latin American Studies

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    Jerzy A. Brzozowski

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Brzozowski, J.A. Biological taxon names are descriptive names. HPLS 42, 29 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00322-1

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