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On Sense And Reference By Gottlob Frege And ' Knowledge By Acquaintance And Knowledge

Satisfactory Essays

In ‘On Sense and Reference’ by Gottlob Frege and ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’ by Bertrand Russell, both Frege and Russell put forward a descriptivist theory of proper names inspired by problems with the naive semantic principle that [NP2] the meaning of a singular term is nothing but its direct referent; this is also known as direct reference theory (Kemp, 2013, p. 2). The following paper will demonstrate that although Frege and Russell can both be thought of as descriptivists, their theories are very different--Frege thinks that proper names are referring terms and Russell thinks they are not. This paper will argue that the Russellian theory of descriptions is superior to Frege’s theory of sense because Russell’s theory does not cause him to assert that a singular term, such as ‘a unicorn’, both exists and does not exist; he does not go against the law of the excluded middle--all of which, Frege does do.
Descriptivist theories of proper names (descriptivism) say that each proper name N has the same semantic value as the definite descriptions that are associated with N. The meaning of N is the collection of its definite descriptions, while the referent of N satisfies all of its definite descriptions (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). This paper will address two problems with naïve semantics that Frege and Russell try to remedy. The first is a problem with non-referring terms, which is illustrated in the example given on page 28 of Meaning

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