Abstract

My original reaction to Yosh’s paper was to grumble. It seemed to me to contain a number of terminological infelicities, unpersuasive arguments, and counterintuitive implications. And while I think that some of my superficial complaints are worth pointing out (and I can’t help myself), a commentary consisting only of grumbling would be neither interesting nor helpful. Paul Viminitz would describe such a commentary as “unseemly”. And so I revisited Yosh’s paper with a more sympathetic eye. My second reaction was to suppose that what Yosh had actually done was to provide a Russellian analysis of sentences containing descriptions but in a 2nd order logical system – a system in which quantification over properties is permitted and in which 1st order quantifiers are reinterpreted as 2nd order properties. This would be an interesting albeit modest contribution to the description literature. But as I reread Yosh’s paper in preparation for writing this commentary, I realized that given the account of individual kinds that was being developed this wasn’t right. Individual kinds are not properties at all, they are a new sort of individual – teams of one. Yosh’s proposal is hardly modest at all. So, in these comments, I am going to focus on the notion of an individual kind and whether or not we ought to endorse such entities in our semantic theorizing. But first, some preliminary grumbling – I really can’t help myself.