Russell groups names are divided into two separate types, such as, logical proper names which can be known by acquaintance and ordinary proper names which are identical to proper names appearance-wise but in reality, they are abbreviated descriptions which Russell believes that most proper names are. Russell used to talk about how every referring phrase (for instance: snow, the author of ‘an Introduction to Philosophy of Language’, the number five, ‘the golden mountain’) is an existing entity. According to this, even an object that does not exist had to be real in order...
Russell groups names are divided into two separate types, such as, logical proper names which can be known by acquaintance and ordinary proper names which are identical to proper names appearance-wise but in reality, they are abbreviated descriptions which Russell believes that most proper names are. Russell used to talk about how every referring phrase (for instance: snow, the author of ‘an Introduction to Philosophy of Language’, the number five, ‘the golden mountain’) is an existing entity. According to this, even an object that does not exist had to be real in order to serve this theory. Yet in 1905 when Russell put his ‘On Denoting’ out there, he sharpened down these strict views he had before and came up with another view where he proposed that every denoting phrase MUST refer to an existing object. The logical structure of sentences is a predicate-singular term, and there are two kinds of singular terms; proper names and definite descriptions. ‘Armstrong ’is a name but ‘the first man on the moon’ is a description, ‘Scott’ is a name, but the ‘author of Waverly’ is a description. It might seem common sense just to assume that definite descriptions and proper names act the same way, as Gottlob Frege did, but according to Russell, ‘a name in the strict sense of the term can never be a description and a description in the strict sense of the term can never be a name’.. In this essay, I am going to go over Bertrand Russell’s theory of definite descriptions and discuss the three problems that come with it as I go, mainly as to whether his answers really solve the puzzle of negative existential statements.