Types and Tokens: Why Is the Same Kind Not the Same Individual?

Three cups of the same design sit on a table. How many cups are there? Three. How many designs? One. Neither answer is a counting mistake: they count different things. A type is a repeatable form; a token is a particular instance. The philosophical type–token distinction keeps these two levels apart.

Cups of the same design need not be physically identical. Differences in glaze or wear on a rim do not necessarily make them different designs. Yet breaking one does not break the other two. Sharing a type is not sharing a single individual existence. Conversely, moving one cup from the kitchen to the study does not create another token.

This distinction is not simply about resemblance. Two cups can look very similar while belonging to different designs; cups of one design can look different after use. Identifying a type requires an explicit criterion, not just a judgement of visual similarity.

The practical value is a clear unit for deciding what is repeated and what is added. Stocktaking counts individual cups; a product catalogue distinguishes designs. Both counts are legitimate, but they are not interchangeable. Philosophers still disagree about whether types exist independently of their instances. We need not settle that dispute before clarifying what we are counting.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/