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.

中文翻译：

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生物分类单元名称是描述性名称。

在生物分类学中广泛使用的所谓“类型方法”通常被视为符合因果历史参考理论。在本文中，我主张为生物命名法提供替代性的参考说明，其中将分类单元名称理解为描述性名称（“ DN账户”）。从Gareth Evans的著作中得知的描述性名称，是通过明确描述引入的引用表达。DN和因果关系之间有三个主要区别。首先，根据DN帐户，不是将名称固定到被引用人，而是应该将类型样本分配为分类单元的名称载体，这应视为在名称和名称的确定描述之间有效地建立了同义词。形成“类型为t ”。因此，每个分类单元名称都与应用程序准则相关联，该准则是建立名称与描述性内容之间联系的语义规则。这是与因果关系的第二个主要区别：分类名称确实具有一些与之相关的描述性内容。异议的最终焦点涉及使用分类单元名称所产生的形式的强度。为了解决这个问题，我使用DN帐户将焦点关于模式标本，名称的误用的误认的约瑟夫·拉波特的真理条件马特·哈伯和Joeri维特芬之间的争论，和德绝对判断必要的句子“任何带有类型标本的物种都必须包含其类型标本”。我使用了描述性的定语用法和指称用法之间的区分的一种务实的变体，我认为，如哈伯先前所言，决定性句子的元语言版本实际上是伪造的。