Abstract
One of the classics of modern philosophy is Bertrand Russell’s essay, ‘On Denoting,’1 in which Russell presents his theory according to which denoting phrases such as ‘every man’ and ‘some man’ do not themselves have any meaning of their own; instead, they provide the means for decoding sentences in which they occur, using the apparatus of modern quantification theory. This is generally thought to be a great advance over Russell’s earlier theory, articulated in The Principles of Mathematics,2 according to which phrases such as ‘every man’ and ‘some man’ are treated as names of special strange entities. There, the phrase ‘every man’ is said to denote a conjunctive entity, and the phrase ‘some man’ is said to denote a disjunctive entity. This theory according to which such phrases are names of special sorts of entities is generally thought to be not just implausible, but downright incoherent. I think that this is not true. Whether the theory is plausible is difficult to assess, but when carefully developed it is perfectly coherent, and logically beyond reproach. This is what I shall argue in the present paper.
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Bibliography
Dau, Paolo [forthcoming], ‘Russell’s First Theory of Denoting and Quantification,’ Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic.
Geach, P. [1962], Reference and Generality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Meinong, A. [1907], Uber die Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie im System der Wissenschaften(Leipzig: Voigtlander).
Russell, B. [1903], Principles of Mathematics (London: Cambridge University Press).
Russell, B. [1905], ‘On Denoting,’ Mind n.s. 14 479 – 93.
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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Parsons, T.D. (1988). Russell’s Early Views on Denoting. In: Austin, D.F. (eds) Philosophical Analysis. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2909-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2909-8_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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