Page 547 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Russell's most famous contributions to philosophy of language are his theories of names and definite descriptions, developed in the first decade of the twen- tieth century. Both theories exclude from the category of 'referring expressions' words that might naively have been taken as paradigms of the category, for example 'Bismarck' and 'the first man to walk on the moon.' In this early period, Russell also produced an account of prepositional attitudes, which has been taken as a model in recent work. In his later phil- osophy, starting from the end of W orld W ar I, Russell sketched causal theories of meaning that are not dis- similar in approach to some accounts formulated over half a century later.
1. Life and Influence
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), third Earl Russell, was a prolific writer not only on specialist topics in math- ematical logic, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, but also on a wide range of more popular social and political issues. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. His father, Viscount Amberley, was the son of Lord John Russell, the Whig politician who introduced the 1832 Reform Bill; his mother was the daughter of Lord Stanley of Alderley, his godfather John Stuart Mill. For many years, though by no means all his working life, he held a fellowship at T rinity College, Cambridge, where he worked closely with both G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He collaborated with A. N. Whitehead in the monumental three- volume Principia Mathematica (1910-13), an attempted reduction of mathematics to logic, and like Gottlob Frege played a major role in the development and philosophical consolidation of first-order logic. He was the first modern philosopher to see the sig- nificance, and potential damage, of logical paradoxes, both in the foundations of mathematics and, more generally, for any systematic, logical theory of language. The main concerns here are his philo- sophy of language, in particular his accounts of refer- ence, mental content, and meaning.
2. Reference
In his Principles of Mathematics (1903), his earliest discussion of semantic questions, Russell was simply unaware of a distinction between meaning and refer- ence, and as a result had trouble with what he called 'denoting phrases' (e.g., 'a man,' 'all men,' 'the man'). Shortly afterwards, and certainly before he wrote the
famous 'On Denoting' (1905), he became aware of Frege's distinction between Sinn ('sense') and Bedeutung ('reference' or 'meaning'), but argued that it was untenable. His agenda was thus to provide a semantic theory that did not make a Frege-like distinc- tion, and yet which did not founder on the problem of denoting phrases.
To lack a distinction between sense and reference is to confront at least two conspicuous problems: there are apparently meaningful terms that do not refer; and there are coreferential but apparently non- synonymous expressions. In his 1903 work, Russell disposes of a range of apparent examples of the first problem by in effect denying that they do not refer. The fundamental semantic relation is that of indi- cating. Expressions indicate 'terms' (1903: 44), and a proposition is about its terms. The expression 'V ulcan' indicates the term Vulcan; there is such a thing (term) as Vulcan but, like many terms, it does not exist (1903: 45). There are more things to refer to than there are things that exist.
In this early work, there is no sign of awareness of the second problem. Rather, what mainly concerned Russell was the difficulty of accommodating denoting phrases within the framework based on the notion of indicating. For example, in the sentence 'I met a man,' the expression 'a man' ought to indicate a concept (a kind of term), but the sentence is not about the concept a man (1903: 53). A proper account of denoting is thus a crucial difficulty for Russell's aim of basing semantics upon the single notion of reference (indication).
2.1 The Theory of Descriptions
The key part of the solution to the problem is provided by the famous 'theory of descriptions.' Russell argues that denoting phrases are quantifier phrases, and are to be identified not by their actually denoting some- thing, but by their form. In particular, 'the,' applied to a predicate in the singular, functions as a uniqueness quantifier, and sentences of the form 'The F is G ' are equivalent to 'There is exactly one F and it is G.' The upshot is that denoting phrases like The present King of France' no longer need to refer to, denote, or indi- cate anything in order to have their proper semantic role. As Russell puts it, they are 'incomplete symbols' and 'have no meaning in isolation' (1905:42). The last phrase may mislead, as it condenses two thoughts. One is that, whether in isolation or in context, these phrases do not have the semantic role of referring, so that a failure of reference is not a failure of semantic
Russell, Bertrand R. M. Sainsbury
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