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Russell's Theory of Descriptions – by Thomas C Ryckman. Russell's theory of descriptions – at Oxford University's Introduction to Logic. Russell's Theory of Descriptions special issue of Mind celebrating the 100th anniversary of Russell's "On Denoting" in which the theory of descriptions was first presented.
"On Denoting" is an essay by Bertrand Russell.It was published in the philosophy journal Mind in 1905. In it, Russell introduces and advocates his theory of denoting phrases, according to which definite descriptions and other "denoting phrases ... never have any meaning in themselves, but every proposition in whose verbal expression they occur has a meaning."
Russell proposed to resolve this puzzle via his theory of descriptions. A definite description like "the present King of France", he suggested, is not a referring expression, as we might naively suppose, but rather an "incomplete symbol" that introduces quantificational structure into sentences in which it occurs.
One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due originally to Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that it does. Wittgenstein, Russell's student, achieved considerable prominence in the philosophy of language after the posthumous publication of the Philosophical ...
"Reference and Definite Descriptions" has been one of Donnellan's most influential essays. Written in response to the work of Bertrand Russell and P. F. Strawson in the area of definite descriptions, the essay develops a distinction between the "referential use" and the "attributive use" of a definite description. The attributive use most ...
According to Russell, the name "Aristotle" is just a sort of shorthand for a definite description such as "The last great philosopher of ancient Greece" or "The teacher of Alexander the great" or some conjunction of two or more such descriptions. Now, according to Russell's theory of definite descriptions, such descriptions must, in turn, be ...
At the time of Kripke's lectures, the dominant theory of reference in analytic philosophy (associated with the theories of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell) was that the meaning of sentences involving proper names could be given by substituting a contextually appropriate description for the name. Russell, [3] for example, famously held that ...
Strawson first became well known with his article "On Referring" (1950), a criticism of Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions (see also Definite descriptions) that Russell explained in the famous "On Denoting" article (1905).