Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 56 of 138
The type-token distinction
In order to explain this distinction I need to say a bit about the type-token distinction. If I write the word “dog” three times: “dog dog dog,” have I written one word or three? Well, I have written three instances, or tokens, of one type of word. So we need a distinction between types, which are abstract general entities, and tokens, which are concrete particular objects and events. A token of a type is a particular concrete exemplification of that abstract general type.