Mind Celebrates OD’s Centenary

Abstract

March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd 1 He actually says this is “where Russell’s theory made a real and lasting diTerence”, but I take this to be simply temporal chauvinism about the signiWcance of current scholarship . russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 27 (winter 2007–08): 259–82 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631 eviews MINDz CELEBRATES ODzz’S CENTENARY Michael Scanlan P.O. Box 95 South StraTord, vt 05070, usa scanlanm@sover.net Special issue: “100 Years of ‘On Denoting’{{{”. Mindz 114, no. 456 (Oct. 2005): 809–1,244. Guest editor: Stephen Neale. issn 0026-4423. £10; $20; ¤16. Online at http://mind.oxfordjournals.org./content/vol114/issue456/index.dtl. Marking the publication of Russell’s seminal paper “On Denoting” is this very appropriate 100th anniversary issue of the journal in which the paper was Wrst published. The issue consists of a convenient photographic reprint of the original article, along with articles by a distinguished group of contributors. One question behind any such centenary is the signiWcance of the original paper after the passage of 100 years. A convenient history of reception/interpretation is provided by Zoltán Gendler Szabó in his article “The Loss of Uniqueness”. He locates Russell’s own concerns as focused on issues in logic and epistemology , but “posterity abandoned Russell’s focus on logic and epistemology and gradually came to see ‘On Denoting’ as a milestone in ontology” (p. 1,199). This approach is exempliWed by post-wwii textbook treatments which advised students that it saved them from believing in non-existent present kings of France and round squares. Szabó correctly reports that today the interest in the theory is almost exclusively focused on its application to the semantics of natural language.1 The truth of this contention is exempliWed by the articles in this issue of Mind, which almost all focus on questions about the adequacy of treating the semantics of deWnite description phrases as being semantically equivalent to sentences involving quantiWcation and identity, à la Russell’s rewriting of “the present King of France is bald”. Those who think that something like this is a correct account of the semantics of these English phrases are the Russellians, those who advocate abandoning this approach are mainly referentialists who March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd 260 Reviews 2 P.yF. Strawson, “On Referring”, Mindz 59 (1950): 320–44. contend that deWnite descriptions can be treated semantically somewhat in the manner of Mill’s contentless proper names. The editor for this issue, Stephen Neale, provides an introductory piece with two main parts to his comments. One (§§1–2) is principally historical and contains a collection of observations on the (surprisingly) still unsettled arguments concerning the purpose of Russell’s theory. In these comments Neale is sound in noting that one main point of Russell’s theory is that deWnite description concepts don’tz denote. He quips, “The title of Russell’s article could be the product of a typographer’s error, a transposition involving the Wrst two letters” (p. 819 n. 41). He also makes very helpful observations on the vexed question of the relation of Russell’s theory to questions of ontic commitment. Especially useful in this regard is a long footnote (p. 823 n. 59) in which he observes that while the PMz contextual deWnition of class expressions is modelled on the strategy of eliminating deWnite descriptions, it serves to eliminate ontic commitment to a category of entities (classes) while the contextual deWnition of deWnite description expressions does not eliminate an entire ontic category (objects). In Neale’s description of the present state of the theory of descriptions, he accurately reports that interest in the theory “centres on the theory construed as (a) a contribution to natural language semantics … and (b) a handy philosophical tool that can be used to reveal the logical forms of sentences …” (p. 827) . He notes that its usefulness for (b) depends on its success at (a). This in turn currently hangs on “… a raft of diUcult, unresolved, and often horribly intertwined debates about context, object...