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Co-Referring Expressions
What is required here is an explanation of the WAY in which the theory of Definite Descriptions addresses the issue of co-referring expressions; right now there is no attempt to link to the whatsoever. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.229.239.199 ( talk) 10:29, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
I've commented out this:
I'll read the paper again when I have the time, but my recollection is that Russell says that both statements are false, because the first term ("Kings of France exist") is false:
The law of the excluded middle is not violated, because the analysis reveals that both statements can be simultaneously false. In fact, looking at the paper now, it's more complex than that, and I'll add what Russell says to the article. -- ajn ( talk) 09:36, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
It's clear to me that Definite description is in fact an article about part of the Theory of Descriptions, and includes criticism of the theory which ought to be in this article. It's entirely about Russell's theory and reactions to it, not about anyone else's definition or use of the term. -- ajn ( talk) 09:59, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
First, I removed the long personal essay on this Talk page about existence. The reason is obvious, I take it. Second, I recently expanded the article. However, I don't exactly specialize in philosophy of language. So, if anyone knows more about Russell's theory of descriptions and can help improve this, please do! There is an article on definite descriptions that has quite a bit of info, but I thought it important to point out that Russell's theory is also about indefinite descriptions. -- Jaymay 06:45, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Notes for myself and anyone else who feels like joining in.
-- ajn ( talk) 16:21, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Kripke defends Russell's analysis of definite descriptions, and argues that Donnellan does not adequately distinguish meaning from use, or, speaker's meaning from sentence meaning. I don't know, where Kripke says that. Is it indeed the case? Commentor 04:46, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
The transcript of Reference and Existence is widely referred to, but almost impossible to obtain, even in Oxford. Has the author read these transcripts, or someone else writing about them? If the latter, that reference should be added. I'd even say that the reference to R&E should be removed.
Link...--> -- Faustnh ( talk) 19:47, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
Currently, the section describing the criticisms of Russell's theory is split out into three sections, covering broadly the criticism by Strawson, Donnellan and Kripke. The section on Kripke isn't so much a criticism of Russell as stating that Kripke responded to Donnellan's criticism of Russell.
I'm thinking of refactoring the section to make it about the criticisms raised rather than about who raised the criticism. Broadly, then, the two existing critiques made by Strawson and Donnellan can be represented like this:
The reason I suggest this is because there is a considerable literature on both topics, and plenty more on other related topics to the theory of descriptions. So, on the matter of incomplete definite descriptions, there is work also by Donnellan, Howard Wettstein, Michael Devitt, Ernie Lepore, Scott Soames, Stephen Neale, Grice, Nathan Salmon and many others. It plays into the debate about semantics and pragmatics.
There is a similarly large literature on the referential/attributive distinction and plenty of other topics that ought to be covered. Switching over to have a topic-focussed criticism section enables the article to scale as this literature gets built. I'll be bold and switch it over when I have a few minutes, but I thought it would be best to explain the reasons for it here. — Tom Morris ( talk) 16:48, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
" Venus "overtakes" Earth every 584 days as it orbits the Sun.[5] As it does so, it changes from the "Evening Star", visible after sunset, to the "Morning Star", visible before sunrise". -- Pasixxxx ( talk) 10:03, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
In short, Russell argued that the syntactic form of descriptions (phrases that took the form of "The aardvark" and "An aardvark") is misleading, as it does not correlate their logical and/or semantic architecture.
This is a terrible sentence and it's the third in the article. Srnec ( talk) 14:37, 9 March 2023 (UTC)