STRAWSONIAN VS. RUSSELLIAN DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS

• Authors: Duzi Marie
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In 1905 Bertrand Russell took on the problem of definite descriptions, and his analysis became the standard until 1950 when Peter Strawson criticised Russell's solution as inadequate. Since then many opponents as well as proponents of the Russellian solution have been involved in a long-term debate on definite descriptions. In this paper the authoress shows that both sides of the contention are partly right and partly wrong, because sentences of the form 'The F is a G' are ambiguous. However, the ambiguity does not concern reference shift of the description 'the F'. Rather, the ambiguity consists in different topic-focus articulations of a given sentence involving occurrences of 'the F'. The authoress demonstrates that when 'the F' is used as a part of the topic of such a sentence the existence of the object denoted by 'the F' is not only entailed by but also presupposed by the sentence. On the other hand 'the F' used in the focus of a sentence triggers merely existential entailment. Thus sentences differing only in their topic-focus articulation should have assigned different logical forms. In order to make such hidden features explicit, she applies the procedural semantics of Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL), furnishing sentences with hyper-propositions that are precisely defined in terms of TIL constructions. These are procedures assigned to sentences as their context-invariant structured meanings. Moreover, the authoress generalises the phenomenon of the topic-focus distinction to sentences of any form, proposing an adequate analytic schema of sentences that come with a presupposition.

Keywords

EN

DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS; HYPER-PROPOSITION; PROCEDURAL SEMANTICS; RUSSELL BERTRAND; STRAWSON P. F.; STRUCTURED MEANING; TRANSPARENT INTENSIONAL LOGIC

Discipline

• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 587-614
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Duzi Marie

• Marie Duzi, VSB-Technicka Univerzita Ostrava, 17. listopadu 15, 708 33 Ostrava, Czech Republic; www.klemens.sav.sk/fiusav/organon

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10SKAAAA074817