The Loss of Uniqueness

Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in R...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Mind 2005-10, Vol.114 (456), p.1185-1222
Main Author: Szabo, Zoltan Gendler
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Criticism
Definite articles
Definite descriptions
Epithets
Intuition
Linguistics
Logic
Logical form
Ordinary language philosophy
Philosophers
Philosophy
Phrases
Predicates
Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (1872-1970)
Semantics
Uniqueness
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two claims can account for Russell's puzzle cases the way he did. Russell had no substantive argument for the claim that ‘The F is G’ entails ‘There is at most one F’; in fact, he had important misgivings about it. I outline an argument against this claim, and I argue that by holding on to uniqueness contemporary semanticists make a momentous mistake: they keep the illusion alive that there is a way to account for linguistic meaning without addressing what linguistic expressions are for.
ISSN:0026-4423
1460-2113
DOI:10.1093/mind/fzi1185