Page 549 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

3. Mental Content
If no distinction is made between meaning and refer- ence, it is natural to see thoughts as involving direct or immediate relations to objects, mirroring the way that the words which can express thoughts relate directly to objects. Thus Russell (1912) analyzes the belief ascription 'Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio' as an extensional four-place relation (the belief relation), said to hold between Othello, Desde- mona, love and Cassio. (It is necessary to pretend that Shakespeare's story is factual.) Russell insists that judging or believing does not involve ideas. In believ- ing what he does, Othello is directly related to various particulars and universals in the world; the relation is not mediated by ideas, which are dangerous in that they lead to idealism. This explains why Russell was happy to equate meaning and reference: there is no room, in his philosophy at this time, for more than one way of thinking about a single thing. Thought involves an unmediated relation to its object. (This view led in turn to the restriction on the possible objects of thought to sense data.)
The account, which has been an inspiration to many contemporary philosophers (e.g., Salmon 1986; David Kaplan in Almog, et al. 1989), faces two main prob- lems. First, it apparently runs foul of Frege's puzzle. As stated above, Russell would try to avoid this by saying that if the substitution of, for example, 'Phos- phorus' for 'Hesperus' really fails to preserve truth value, then the substituted expressions must be descriptions, and not really names.
The other problem is that it is unclear how Russell's theory could be extended to sentences containing logi- cal constants, and this is a problem that he did not address.
4. LaterViewsonMeaning
In My Philosophical Development (1959), Russell says that it was not until 1918 that he 'first became inter- ested in the definition of "meaning" and in the relation of language to fact' (1959:145). This raises questions, given that the problems of descriptions and names, to which he contributed so much before 1918, seem to be precisely such issues.
In the earlier period, he was content to identify the meaning of a genuinely simple name with its bearer, and leave the matter there. In The Analysis of Mind (1921), however, the question is 'not who is the indi- vidual meant, but what is the relation of the word to the individual which makes the one mean the other' (1921: 191). What he provides is an account of the conditions under which a speaker has internalized a
name-object relation. An example of a sufficient con- dition for one to understand a word is that one be caused by the impact of that word to do what one would have been caused to do by the impact of what it stands for (1921: 199; 1940: 25). He is right to say that this is a topic, bringing as it does a causal element into meaning, to which he made no attempt to con- tribute before 1918.
The second way in which Russell's classification of his early work can be understood as not relating to linguistics is that in the early period he often writes as though what matters above all is what is going on in the mind of the thinker, rather than the wordswhich may be used to express this. Hence his willingness to say that ordinary names are 'really' descriptions: as an account of language, thought of as a public vehicle of communication, this would be nonsensical, and, as seen above in connection with 'Bismarck,' Russell would not accept it. However, the view has a chance of being true if it is an account of nonlinguistic entities (Russell often speaks of 'propositions') which are the vehicles of thought.
See also: Names and Decriptions; Reference: Philo- sophical Issues.
Bibliography
Almog J, Perry J, Wettstein H (eds.) 1989 Themes from Kaplan. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Frege G 1892 Uber Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift fur Philosophic und Philosophische Kritik 100: 25-50 (1952 On sense and reference. In: Geach P, Black M (eds.) Trans- lations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Basil Blackwell,Oxford)
Kripke S 1980 Naming and Necessity, rev edn. Basil Blackwell, Oxford
Russell B 1903 Principles of Mathematics. Allen and Unwin, London
Russell B 1905 On denoting. In: Marsh R C (ed.) 1956 Logic and Knowledge. Allen and Unwin, London
Russell B 1910 Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. In: Russell B 1963 Mysticism and Logic. Allen and Unwin, London
Russell B 1912 Problems of Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford
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Russell B 1940 An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. Allen and Unwin, London
Russell B 1959 My Philosophical Development. Allen and Unwin, London
Sainsbury R M 1993 Russell on names and communication. In: Irvine A, Wedekind G (eds.) Russell and Analytic Phil- osophy. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver
Salmon N 1986 Frege's Puzzle. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Russell, Bertrand
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