The Attributive Use and Russell’s Paradigm

• Authors: Wojciech Rostworowski

Title variants

PL

The Attributive Use and Russell’s Paradigm

EN

The Attributive Use and Russell’s Paradigm

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

According to the prevailing view, Russell’s theory of descriptions provides an adequate semantic account of sentences with definite descriptions in the attributive use. The author challenges this assumption. Firstly, he presents two general ‘Straw­sonian’ objections to Russell’s theory, which, as he argues, are valid in the case of attributive assertions. Those are arguments against the so called existential reading and the uniqueness-reading of an attributively used sentence of the form “The F is G”. Finally, the author presents his own objection which appeals to the fact that the Russellian analysis does not account for an intuitive inferential property of attributive assertions.

• Publisher: University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy
• Journal: Filozofia Nauki
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 59-68

Dates

published

2013-06-01

Contributors

author

Wojciech Rostworowski