Why Fish Don't Exist

Miller opens Chapter 5 by noting that naming plays a particularly important role in bringing things into existence in some strains of philosophical thought: “The name itself is a thing of great power, then, the vessel that drags the idea from the imaginary to the earthly realm” (63). Some thinkers take this concept as far as to question the nature of existence, including University of Virginia philosopher Trenton Merricks, who argues that things as we conceive them don’t exist, “that the names we place on things often turn out to be wrong” (64). On the other end of the spectrum, Miller writes, taxonomists place a kind of spiritual significance on naming, placing ‘holotypes’—the first example of a named species—in jars that are place on museum shelves.

From here, Miller moves on to describe visiting one of these specimens in jars – the one fish species David Starr Jordan named after himself. To do this, she goes to the Smithsonian’s annex specimen library, where she walks past “a roomful of ungulates, hooves and antlers sticking out of drawers, past the hall of reptiles,” and into the section of the building that houses the fish (66). In this section, she finds Agonomalus jordani, discovered by Jordan off the coast of Japan in 1904.