Russell's Theory of Descriptions

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) presented his Theory of Descriptions in the 1905 article "On Denoting," published in the philosophical journal Mind, an essay that F.P. Ramsey later called "a paradigm of philosophy." Russell's target was the class of expressions he called "denoting phrases," including definite descriptions of the form "the F" (such as "the present King of France" or "the author of Waverley"), and his aim was to resolve three interlocking puzzles that such phrases generate. The first, the puzzle of non-being, concerns sentences like "The present King of France is bald": since France has had no king since 1848, the subject term appears to denote nothing, yet the sentence seems meaningful, and it is unclear whether it should be judged true, false, or neither. The second puzzle, drawn from Frege, concerns the informativeness of identity statements involving descriptions, such as "Scott is the author of Waverley" — Sir Walter Scott, discovered in 1815 to be the anonymous author of the novel Waverley. The third, the puzzle of the Law of Excluded Middle, asks how "the present King of France is bald" and "the present King of France is not bald" can both fail to be true of an existing object, apparently violating the principle that one of any pair of contradictories must hold.