Some Problems Concerning Meaning

Abstract

The two terms ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘The Evening Star’ denote one and the same thing and yet in the very act of denoting it—one may say, for that denoting purpose itself—describe it in two different ways. This is such a simple phenomenon that none but philosophers could get interested in it. May not a particular thing, or even a particular class of things, have two or more distinguishing features, and may we not distinguish it, specify it or point to it through any one of these features, ‘through’ meaning in most cases stating the feature concerned in so many words? These features may, in their turn, be complex, i.e. breakable into simpler constituents; but, broken that way or not, they distinguish the thing only as they are taken, in each case, in that complex form. May be, at some incautious moments some unnecessary characters creep unnoticed into the complex. But that is never a problem: sooner or later one will have to rid oneself of them, and mostly when one resorts to analysis one does it precisely for that kind of purge.