Abstract
By now his theory has attained the status of a new paradigm. Even a casual trawl of the literature throws up over a score of citations and endorsements, and no rebuttals of its central contention that the primary use of 'the' is to indicate totality (621). We shall argue that it is wrong for mass description, wrong for singular description, wrong for plural description and wrong for generic 'the'. Sharvy would have approved: his obituary says that his car displayed the slogan 'Subvert the Dominant Paradigm'. He follows Russell in treating descriptions as incomplete symbols, but nothing in his paper turns on this aspect of it, and we can bypass the issue by considering them in the context of complete sentences. Where Russell translates F(the G) into the predicate calculus as
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