Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) followed Frege in a number of ways: he was about a generation younger than Frege, shared his interest in mathematics (though not as a professional mathematician), and offered an alternative to Frege’s approach to founding mathematics on logic (after arguing that Frege’s approach led to inconsistencies).

Russell did have philosophical interests much broader than Frege’s, something that you will see indications of at the end of this article. But, although it will be less clear here, he did not share Frege’s deep interest in the workings of language. That meant that, apart from the account of definite descriptions presented in this article, Russell had less influence than Frege on later thinking about meaning.

Assignment for Mon. 2/3: pp. 479-484

Russell begins with his account of what he calls “denoting expressions” (which some of you will recognize as examples of quantifier phrases), turning eventually to the case of definite descriptions (i.e., phrases of the form ‘the …’) that will be his (and our) main focus. He concludes this part of the article with a sketch of alternative approaches, first one due to Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), an Austrian philosopher and psychologist who was a near contemporary of Frege, and then Frege’s approach (for which he uses different vocabulary than we have been employing, calling sense ‘meaning’ and reference ‘denotation’).

Assignment for Wed. 2/5: pp. 484-488

Next, Russell suggests some puzzles to be solved by an account of definite descriptions. These occupy p. 485; but, before providing his solutions, Russell offers (on pp. 486-487) one of the most puzzling discussions in all of his work. It’s clear that he intends to present a difficulty for Frege’s view of meaning (though he also has in mind an analogous view he himself had held in earlier work), but the nature of that difficulty is somewhat obscure. (So, don’t worry if you find these two pages difficult: everyone does.)

Assignment for Fri. 2/7: pp. 488-493

This final part of the paper includes Russell’s solutions to his three puzzles (pp. 488-491) followed some further considerations in favor of his approach to definite descriptions. The last of these considerations (presented in the next-to-last paragraph of the article) became the heart of Russell’s theory of knowledge and (along with his reduction of mathematics to logic) became a centerpiece for 20th century efforts to reformulate empiricism using the resources of logic. Many of the theories of meaning offered by analytic philosophers in the first half of the 20th century were designed to accompany one or another version of such a logically sophisticated empiricism.