Why Definite Descriptions Really are Referring Terms

According to Russell, '... the phi ...' means: 'exactly one object has phi and ... that object ...'. Strawson pointed out that, if somebody asked how many kings of France there were, it would be deeply inappropriate to respond by saying '... the king of France ...': the respondent appears to be presupposing the very thing that, under the circumstances, he ought to be asserting. But it would seem that if Russell's theory were correct, the respondent would be asserting exactly what he was asked to assert. So Russell's theory wrongly predicts that the respondent's answer will be appropriate. Russellians deal with this by saying that this anti-Russellian intuition embodies our reaction not to what is semantically encoded in the respondent's words, but to what is pragmatically imparted by them. So Russell's theory is correct: the fact that it appears wrong is due to the distorting effects of pragmatics. In this paper I show that pragmatic phenomena cannot possibly be responsible for the just mentioned anti-Russellian intuition. No matter how hard we try to put the blame on pragmatics, Russell's theory still falls short. It follows that defi nite descriptions really are what they appear to be: referring expressions. I argue that defi nite descriptions are complex demonstratives; and, within that framework, I deal with cases where defi nite descriptions appear to be functioning non-referentially. I also solve Frege's puzzle within the framework defi ned by my treatment of defi nite descriptions taken in conjunction with Kripke-Kaplan semantics.

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A Puzzle about Logical Analysis

Philosophia ◽

10.1007/s11406-021-00405-8 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Stefan Rinner

Keyword(s):

Complete Solution ◽

Definite Descriptions ◽

Logical Analysis ◽

Frege’S Puzzle ◽

Main Thesis ◽

Frege's Puzzle ◽

Belief Ascriptions

AbstractIn this paper, I will present a puzzle for logical analyses, such as Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions and Recanati’s analysis of ‘that’-clauses. I will argue that together with Kripke’s disquotational principles connecting sincere assent and belief such non-trivial logical analyses lead to contradictions. Following this, I will compare the puzzle about logical analysis with Frege’s puzzle about belief ascriptions. We will see that although the two puzzles do have similarities, the solutions to Frege’s puzzle cannot be applied mutatis mutandis to the puzzle about logical analysis. Hence, to say it with Kripke, the main thesis of this paper is that the puzzle is a puzzle. A complete solution to the puzzle promises a better understanding of both logical analyses and belief ascriptions.

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Frege's Puzzle.

The Philosophical Review ◽

10.2307/2185233 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 96 (3) ◽

pp. 455 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Graeme Forbes ◽

Nathan Salmon

Keyword(s):

Frege’S Puzzle ◽

Frege's Puzzle

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Presupposition: What went wrong?

Semantics and Linguistic Theory ◽

10.3765/salt.v26i0.3954 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 26 ◽

pp. 705 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Lauri Karttunen

Keyword(s):

First Generation ◽

Definite Descriptions ◽

Turn Of The Century ◽

Bertrand Russell ◽

The Rich ◽

To Come ◽

King Of France ◽

Aspectual Verbs ◽

Paul Grice ◽

Presupposition Triggers

When the first generation of generative linguists discovered presuppositions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the initial set of examples was quite small. Aspectual verbs like stop were discussed already by Greek philosophers, proper names, Kepler, and definite descriptions, the present king of France, go back to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell by the turn of the century. Just in the span of a few years my generation of semanticists assembled a veritable zoo of ‘presupposition triggers’ under the assumption that they were all of the same species. Generations of students have learned about presuppositions from Stephen Levinson’s 1983 book on Pragmatics that contains a list of 13 types of presupposition triggers, an excerpt of an even longer unpublished list attributed to a certain Lauri Karttunen. My task in this presentation is to come clean and show why the items on Levinson’s list should not have been lumped together. In retrospect it is strange that the early writings about presupposition by linguists and even by philosophers like Robert Stalnaker or Scott Soames do not make any reference to the rich palette of semantic relations they could have learned from Frege and later from Paul Grice. If we had known Frege’s concepts of Andeutung – Grice’s conventional implicature – and Nebengedanke, it would have been easy to see that there are types of author commitment that are neither entailments nor presuppositions.

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Character, proper names, and Frege’s Puzzle

Filosofia Unisinos ◽

10.4013/10246 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 17 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Filipe Martone

Keyword(s):

Proper Names ◽

Frege’S Puzzle ◽

Frege's Puzzle

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Kripke on Epistemic and Metaphysical Possibility

Analytic Philosophy in America ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691160726.003.0007 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Scott Soames

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

A Posteriori ◽

Singular Proposition ◽

Metaphysical Possibility ◽

Frege’S Puzzle ◽

Frege's Puzzle ◽

Necessary A Posteriori ◽

Errors And Confusions

This chapter discusses Saul Kripke’s treatment of the necessary a posteriori and concomitant distinction between epistemic and metaphysical possibility. It extracts the enduring lessons of his treatment of these matters and disentangles them from errors and confusions that mar some of his most important discussions. It argues that there are two Kripkean routes to the necessary a posteriori—one correct and philosophically far-reaching; the other incorrect, philosophically misleading, and the source of damaging errors that persist to this day. It connects two false principles involved in the second, unsuccessful, route to the necessary a posteriori with the plausible and potentially correct idea that believing a singular proposition that o is F always involves also believing a richer more descriptively informative proposition in which some further property plays a role in the agent’s thoughts about o. It explains why this idea will not save the failed second route to the necessary a posteriori and suggests that it may help reconcile Kripke’s insights with the lessons of Frege’s puzzle.

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Why is Frege’s Puzzle Still Puzzling ?

Frege: Sense and Reference One Hundred Years Later ◽

10.1007/978-94-011-0411-1_12 ◽

1995 ◽

pp. 151-168

Author(s):

Eros Corazza ◽

Jerome Dokič

Keyword(s):

Frege’S Puzzle ◽

Frege's Puzzle

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Patterns, noise, and Beliefs

Principia an international journal of epistemology ◽

10.5007/1808-1711.2019v23n1p19 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 19-51

Author(s):

Lajos Ludovic Brons

Keyword(s):

Empirical Evidence ◽

Gettier Cases ◽

Frege’S Puzzle ◽

Daniel Dennett ◽

Belief Reports ◽

Frege's Puzzle ◽

Principle Of Charity

In “Real Patterns” Daniel Dennett developed an argument about the reality of beliefs on the basis of an analogy with patterns and noise. Here I develop Dennett’s analogy into an argument for descriptivism, the view that belief reports do no specify belief contents but merely describe what someone believes, and show that this view is also supported by empirical evidence. No description can do justice to the richness and specificity or “noisiness” of what someone believes, and the same belief can be described by different sentences or propositions (which is illustrated by Dennett’s analogy, some Gettier cases, and Frege’s puzzle), but in some contexts some of these competing descriptions are misleading or even false. Faithful (or truthful) description must be guided by a principle (or principles) related to the principle of charity: belief descriptions should not attribute irrationality to the believer or have other kinds of “deviant” implications.

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