Russell’s Early Views on Denoting

Abstract

One of the classics of modern philosophy is Bertrand Russell’s essay, ‘On Denoting,’¹ in which Russell presents his theory according to which denoting phrases such as ‘every man’ and ‘some man’ do not themselves have any meaning of their own; instead, they provide the means for decoding sentences in which they occur, using the apparatus of modern quantification theory. This is generally thought to be a great advance over Russell’s earlier theory, articulated in The Principles of Mathematics,² according to which phrases such as ‘every man’ and ‘some man’ are treated as names of special strange entities. There, the phrase ‘every man’ is said to denote a conjunctive entity, and the phrase ‘some man’ is said to denote a disjunctive entity. This theory according to which such phrases are names of special sorts of entities is generally thought to be not just implausible, but downright incoherent. I think that this is not true. Whether the theory is plausible is difficult to assess, but when carefully developed it is perfectly coherent, and logically beyond reproach. This is what I shall argue in the present paper.