marc o brien remind me this on philosophy of math in last century russell worked well on it and it was really a worthful work in its era: One of the distinctions which Frege failed to make was a distinction between names and descriptions. In Frege’s system ‘Socrates’ and ‘the teacher of Plato’ are treated as the same kind of symbol, as being a name with a sense and a reference. Before Wittgenstein, Russell had argued that this was a mistake: a name like ‘Socrates’, if it was a genuine proper name,had meaning solely by having a reference; and an expression like‘the teacher of Plato’ should not be called a name at all, if only because unlike a genuine name it had parts which were significant symbols in their own right. Russell’s positive account of such expressions is called his theory of definite descriptions: it was much admired by Wittgenstein and had a considerable influence on his thought. In Principia Mathematica Russell introduced the topic as follows: Suppose we say ‘The round square does not exist.’ It seems plain that this is a true proposition, yet we cannot regard it as denying the existence of a certain object called ‘the round square’. For if there were such an object, it would exist: we cannot first assume that there is a certain object, and then proceed to deny that there is such an object. Whenever the grammatical subject of a proposition can be supposed not to exist without rendering the proposition meaningless, it is plain that the grammatical subject is not a proper name, i.e. not a name directly representing some object. Thus in all such cases the proposition must be capable of being so analysed that what was the grammatical subject shall have disappeared. Thus when we say ‘Theround square does not exist’ we may, as a first attempt at such analysis,substitute ‘It is false that there is an object x which is both round and square.’ (Principia Mathematica, 2nd ed., p. 66) Wittgenstein Sir ANTHONY KENNY Revised Edition First published 1973 by Harvard University Press This revised edition published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 21:15:31 +0000
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