While logically, proper names (‘this’ or ‘that’ which all mainly call out to the sensations and immediately get the agent’s attention) do have referents and descriptive phrases like (‘the smallest number less than pi) must be seen as quantifiers such as ‘all’ and ‘some’. All these words are to be seen as words that gain meaning once they are being used in a sentence and otherwise lose their meanings and become completely meaningless. In other words, there are some phrases that may add to the meaning...
While logically, proper names (‘this’ or ‘that’ which all mainly call out to the sensations and immediately get the agent’s attention) do have referents and descriptive phrases like (‘the smallest number less than pi) must be seen as quantifiers such as ‘all’ and ‘some’. All these words are to be seen as words that gain meaning once they are being used in a sentence and otherwise lose their meanings and become completely meaningless. In other words, there are some phrases that may add to the meaning of a sentence while being completely meaningless outside of the sentence. For instance; if ‘the author of an Introduction to Philosophy of Language’ meant anything other than ‘Michael’, ‘Michael is the author of an Introduction to Philosophy of Language’ would be false, which it is not. If ‘the author of an Introduction to Philosophy of Language’ meant ‘Michael’, ‘Michael is the author of an Introduction to Philosophy of Language’ would be a tautology, which it is not. Therefore, ‘the author of an Introduction of Philosophy of Language’ means neither ‘Michael’ nor anything else. ‘the author of an Introduction to Philosophy of Language’ means nothing. And if Russell is right, it pursues that in a sentence like; ‘the present King of France is bald’ which the ‘the present King of France’ definite description plays a different role from the role a proper name such as ‘Michael’ plays in a sentence. With the distinction between logical forms, this opens a door for Russell to explain three important puzzles which I am going to talk about.