...For millennia, humans have used physical tokens to record credits and debts. This chapter focuses on objects broken apart into pieces that can be put back together again to indicate an obligation incurred or a debt settled. From sheep’s knucklebones or clay potsherds in ancient Greece, to notched...

...There is a widely recognized but infrequently discussed distinction between the spatiotemporal furniture of the world (tokens) and the types of which they are instances. Words come in both types and tokens — for example, there is only one word type “the,” but there are numerous tokens...

...This chapter emphasizes the importance of words and how they are what glue their tokens together, making them significant nodes in linguistic taxonomy. Just as members of a species form a kind, so do the tokens of a word. This analogy between words and species is explored further, together...