The Denoting Reader

Abstract

Reviews 77 THE DENOTING READER NICHOLAS GRIFFIN Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, ON, Canada L8s 4M2 NGRIFFIN@MCMASTER.CA Gary Ostertag, ed. Definite Descriptions: a Reader. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT P., 1998. Pp. xii, 411. US$32.95 (cloth); US$30.00 (pb). Russell's theory of definite descriptions has been widely and continuously debated in the half century since Strawson published "On Referring".I Given the number of important papers written on the topic in that timenot to mention the even larger number of unimportant ones-it is more than a little surprising that there has been, until Ostertag's book, no substantial collection of readings on the topic. Ostertag's Definite Descriptions fills this gap admirably-though, as he admits at the outset, many important papers and some important topics have been left out. Among the latter he mentions descriptive pronouns (p. xi); I shall mention some others below. The papers can be divided into two main groups: four selections in which Russell's original theory is expounded and a group of eight papers taking sides on various current controversies over the adequacy of Russell's theory. In between are three more miscellaneous papers: Strawson's "On Referring", which couldn't well be omitted and, in any case, set several of the current controversies going; an extract from Carnap's Meaning and Necessity giving a version of Frege's conventional denotation proposal; and Karel Lambert's "A I Mind (1950); reprinted here as Chap. 6. 78 Reviews Theory of Definite Descriptions", which represents free logic.2 Lambert's paper is a decent introduction to free logic, but it was written too early to capture the important link between Strawson's paper and free logic which emerged with the development of supervaluational semantics for free logic. Sadly, there is nothing on Meinongian theories of descriptions, which have had a substantial revival since the 19705. Nor is there anything on more purely linguistic work on definite descriptions. Rereading Strawson's paper after all theseyears, one is struck first by how beautifully written it is. One is also struck by the fact that although it pointed to all sorts of fruitful developments, it does hardly anything to bring them about. An amusing case in point is the "very special and odd sense of 'imply'" (p. 145) in which, Strawson wants to say, "The king of France is wise" implies that there is a king of France. Strawson repeatedly invokes this sense and toward the end of his paper even refers to the sense as "by now familiar" (p. 157). But repeatedly calling something "strange" does not make it familiar, and Strawson says not one thing about it-except that it does not mean either "entail" or "assert". It is, of course, the useful notion of presupposition , given formal articulation by van Fraassen,3 against every warning by Strawson who maintained that "ordinary language has no exact logic" (p. 159). Here, and elsewhere, Strawson's paper proved seminal in spite of his best efforts. The four expository selections include three by Russell: "On Denoting" (of course), the much more accessible chapter on descriptions from Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy,4 .and the relevant sections of Principia Mathematica (pp. 30-2 and 66-71 from the Introduction, and the Summary of *14). These are well-nigh essential, but the dotty notation of Principia does pose problems for using the text in the classroom. Perhaps because I had assumed that the students would get the hang of it relatively quickly, I found myself continually obliged to stop and translate into a notation that used more brackets and fewer dots. Fortunately, Ostertag himself gives a lucid summary in more modern notation in his Introduction.5 The fourth paper in 1 From his Philosophical Applications of Free Logic (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1962; New York: Oxford U. P., 1991)-wrongly cited in the bibliography as "Philosophical Foundations of Free Logic". 3 Cf "Presuppositions, Supervaluations, and Free Logic", in K. Lambert, ed., The Logical ~y of Doing Things (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U. P., 1969); and Formal Semantics and Logic (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 153-63. 4 Reprinted complete with typos: "a propositional fUnction x' (towards the foot...