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Stroll on Russell's “Proof”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert Fahrnkopf
Robert Fahrnkopf*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

Avrum Stroll, in his article “Russell's ‘Proof’ “ (this Journal, IV.4, June 1975) makes a number of interesting ——though, as I shall argue, misconceived ——observations about Russell's philosophy of language. The points on which I take issue with Stroll concern, first, his claim that the arguments used in Principia Mathematica (hereafter abbreviated to PM) to distinguish names from descriptions differ significantly from the arguments to the same purpose in My Philosophical Development (MPD); second, his challenge to Russell's view that descriptive phrases acquire meaning by being put into a sentential context; third, his contention that Russell's various attempts to prove that names differ from descriptions are based on fallacious arguments; and fourth, his speculations about the factors prompting Russell to make the assumption that proper names have meaning and that this meaning is independent of any sentential context. I will discuss each of these points in turn.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 569 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1976

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References

1 Page references are to Logic and Knowledge, Allen and Unwin, 1956.

2 My account would require some expansion and qualification to deal with the notion of a secondary occurrence of a descriptive phrase, but the main point would be unaffected. Thus, if the phrase ‘the present King of France’ has a secondary occurrence in ‘the present King of France is not bald,’ the description does not carry with it the assertion of existence, but the analysis of such a phrase―which could be crudely stated as: “There is an entity which is now King of France”― puts the phrase in a form in which it stands for something, viz., the fact that there is such an entity, though, unlike the case in which such a descriptive phrase has a primary occurrence, no claim is here made that there is such a fact.