  Since types are usually thought to be universals, the debate over whether they exist is as longstanding as the debate over universals, and debaters fall into the same camps. Realists say they do, as we saw in §5 which surveyed several varieties of realism. Realism's traditional opponents were nominalists and conceptualists. Nominalists, who renounce universals and abstract objects, say they don't.  (See, e.g., Goodman and Quine 1947, Quine 1953, Goodman 1977 and Bromberger 1992b). Conceptualists argued that there are no general things such as the species homo sapiens; there are only general ideas—that is, ideas that apply to more than one thing. Applied to words, the thesis would be that words are not abstract objects “out there”, but objects in the mind.  Their existence then, would be contingent on having been thought of.  While this contingency may have a good deal of plausibility in the case of linguistic items, by itself conceptualism is just a stopgap measure on the issue of types and tokens generally. For ideas themselves are also either types or tokens (as evidenced by the fact that two people sometimes have the same idea). So either the conceptualist is proposing that types are idea types—which would be a species of realism—or she is proposing that there are no types, only mental idea particulars in particular persons, which is a version of nominalism. Conceptualism, therefore, will be ignored in what follows.