Keith Donnellan
| Abstract | Keith Donnellan (1931 – ) began his studies at the University of Maryland, and earned his Bachelor’s degree from Cornell University. He stayed on at Cornell, earning a Master’s and a PhD in 1961. He also taught at there for several years before moving to UCLA in 1970, where he is currently Emeritus Professor of Philosophy. Donnellan’s work is mainly in the philosophy of language, with an emphasis on the connections between semantics and pragmatics. His most influential work was his 1966 paper “Reference and Definite Descriptions”. In this paper, he challenges the canonical view, due to Bertrand Russell, about definite descriptions. Russell had argued that the proper semantic treatment of a definite description such as “the present king of France” was quantificational. Thus, a sentence like “the present king of France is bald” should be analyzed as “There exists one and only one entity x that is the present king of France, and x is bald”. Donnellan argues that in natural languages, there are actually two different kinds of uses of definite descriptions. Russell’s analysis picks out the “attributive” use of definite descriptions. When we use a definite description (“the F”) this way, we mean to make statements about the unique entity x that is F. However, Donnellan notes that we also sometimes use definite descriptions “referentially” to pick out a given entity and say something about it. To see this, imagine you are at a party where virtually everyone is drinking beer. However, you and your friend are observing a man in a corner of the room holding a martini glass. Unbeknownst to you, the man’s glass is filled with water. You turn to your friend and ask, “who is the man drinking a martini?” Suppose further that your friend knows that the man in question is Fred and that Fred’s glass is filled with water. According to the Russellian attributive analysis, such a question would amount to asking for the identity of the one and only one man drinking a martini. But the presupposition that there is a man drinking a martini is false, and so there should be no answer to the question.. | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesKeith S. Donnellan (1966). Reference and Definite Descriptions. Philosophical Review 75 (3):281-304.
Saul A. Kripke (1977). Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference. In Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr & Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Studies in the Philosophy of Language. University of Minnesota Press.
Genoveva Marti (2008). Direct Reference and Definite Descriptions. Dialectica 62 (1):43–57.
Stefano Predelli (2003). Russellian Description and Smith's Suicide. Acta Analytica 18 (1-2):125-141.
Robin Jeshion (2001). Donnellan on Neptune. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (1):111-135.
Francesco Pupa (2008). Ambiguous Articles: An Essay On The Theory Of Descriptions. Dissertation, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Scott Soames (2009). Philosophical Essays: Natural Language: What It Means and How We Use It. Princeton University Press.
Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.) (2004). Descriptions and Beyond. Oxford University Press.
Wojciech Rostworowski (2011). Rigid Designation and Definite Descriptions. Filozofia Nauki 4.
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