Skip to main content

Russell's Theory of Descriptions




Someone at Yahoo!Answers asks, "What is Russell's Theory of Descriptions about?"


Hey, I do what I can to help those in need.


Russell was concerned with the truth or falsity of a statement of this sort, "The King of France is bald." The statement appears at first to violate the law of the excluded middle (LEM) -- roughly, the notion that any sufficiently unambiguous and clear proposition is either true or false. Russell wanted to keep LEM for his own metaphysical and epistemological reasons, so he needed a theory that could show that the proposition, "the King of France is bald" is either true, or false, or ambiguous.

Notice that the statement is in the present tense. France is nowadays a republic, and was a republic when Russell wrote. There is no King, thus he is neither bald nor does his head have hair.

Russell's solution, the theory of descriptions, says in effect that what the statement in question really means is this: the world I live in is a place that includes a King of France who is bald.

And THAT sentence is false. Thus, LEM is saved.

In short form, the Russellian theory of descriptions says that definite descriptions are "existentially quantified statements."


http://www.mth.msu.edu/~mccarthy/student.information/existential.html


Russell was also arguing with Frege in the course of developing his own theory of such matters, which explains why Russell and Frege are both running after the nonexistent King in the cartoon above.


And that one has a full head of hair, which also saves LEM.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more