Deferred Ostension Of Extinct And Fictive Kinds

Abstract

This article applies Quine's account of deferred ostension and the Kripke-Putnam account of reference to natural kinds in order to solve two problems that arise concerning the deferred ostension of two sorts of absent referents, extinct and fictive kinds. First, the sample problem concerns how a rigid designation to a kind can be established even though the fossil or depiction is an imitative representation rather than an instance of the kind itself. The author argues that the retained characteristic shape, understood via analogy with living creatures, supports the deferred ostension of the extinct kind. Second, the contrast problem concerns how the deferred ostensions of imitative representations for extinct species differ from the imitative representations for fictional species, that is, how sampled fossils differ from sampled depictions. The author argues that the difference is a causal one. We know that fossils happen thanks to a natural causal process that embeds the fossil imitation in the primary world of perceived things; depictions of fictional kinds lack intrinsic causal properties and therefore embed their references in a secondary world of fiction. The article concludes by suggesting we approach the problem of negative existentials as a question of embedding in the primary world of causality or the secondary world of noncausal relations.