The argument for this turns on cases where these expressions are embedded in propositional attitude environments, as in 14a and 14b. According to Soames, there are contexts of utterance and worlds of evaluation where 14a is true but 14b is false.
Hence names cannot be rigidified descriptions. But see Nelson for a response to this argument. Some form of this idea has been offered by Evans , Stanley a, b , Chalmers , , and Jackson Here the basic idea is that the content of a description picks out different contents in different possible worlds.
In other worlds we will draw on other descriptive contents. As Jackson , puts the idea:. Soames has responded that this particular 2-dimensionalist approach is tantamount to the claim that descriptive theories of reference determination are priori irrefutable, since any evidence that a term refers to an object is automatically taken to demonstrate the existence of an implicit description in our minds that successfully determines reference, whether or not we can successfully state it.
Additional criticism of 2-dimensionalism criticism can be found in Block and Stalnaker and Byrne and Pryor One of the arguments that Strawson enlisted on behalf of the referential theory of descriptions was the following. Since the pronoun in 1 gets its content from the description that it is anaphoric on, and because the pronoun refers, it must be the case that the description also refers.
There are obviously two responses to Strawson here. One may either reject the idea that the content of the pronoun is in some sense dependent upon the description for example, one might claim it independently picks out some object raised to salience Lewis , one might claim that it is a bound variable Geach , or one can argue that the pronoun is a kind of definite description in disguise.
The philosophical attraction of this view should be obvious. What it allows us to do is to make sense of cases where we employ nondenoting pronouns in negative existentials, belief reports, and fictional contexts.
Examples would be the following:. Clearly if these pronouns are referring expressions then any victories won through the theory of descriptions are going to be fleeting.
In effect, all the unwelcome metaphysical commitments that we banished by using descriptions would re-enter via the back door as soon as we employ anaphoric pronouns in our discourse. But if we treat anaphors as standing proxy for descriptions, the back door is blocked as well. Nor is this strategy necessarily limited to pronominal anaphora. Ludlow , has argued that temporal and modal anaphora can be handled in a similar manner.
Now clearly this does not mean that I turned the stove off once in my life, but rather there is intuitively some relevant time when I turned it off—for example, when I left the house this morning. The standard analysis would have it that I refer to a past time or past time interval here, but such an analysis does not go down well with presentists, who do not believe that there are such intervals, and at a minimum we might think there is something epistemologically troubling about referring to past and future times to see this, consider what a Russellian might say, given that some notion of direct acquaintance is required on the Russellian view.
An alternative would be to suppose that the implicit temporal anaphora here can be accounted for by the introduction of descriptive material—an explicit temporal when-clause—as in 18 , for example. See Ludlow for discussion of difficulties with this strategy. As in the pronominal anaphora case, descriptive material does the work that reference does in most other accounts of the semantics of temporal and modal discourse.
Again, the goal is metaphysical austerity and faithfulness to our epistemic position. For all of that, the theory has encountered a number of objections. Consider 19 , for example, and a paraphrase 20 in which the pronoun is rendered as a description. Heim observed that 20 unlike 19 implies that a unique man entered the room and that 20 will therefore be false if two men enter the room. The question is, is there some way to answer this objection and retain the descriptive analysis of anaphora?
See Kanazawa for a literature review and criticism of this idea. Another idea, considered in Heim , Ludlow , and Elbourne is to see how descriptive theories of pronouns fare when embedded within an event-based or situation based theories of conditionals like those articulated by Berman , Kratzer , and Lycan On an event-based analysis of conditionals, we would expect a treatment of 19 along the lines of To see this we need merely recognize that even though two men say Ralph and Norton may turn the switch simultaneously, it is still the case that we can recognize two independent minimal events; one where Ralph turns the switch and one where Norton turns the switch.
Unfortunately, there are more sophisticated versions of these cases where simple relativization to events will not do. These include the sage plant examples discussed in Heim , and Kadmon Here the problem is that the minimal event appears to contain ten sage plants, so we are left to ask how the pronoun, rendered as a definite description complete with a uniqueness claim, is supposed to work.
There is no unique sage plant in the minimal events. Or at least a more detailed story needs to be told. The interesting feature of this example is that the uniqueness implications of the definite descriptions remain problematic, for they imply that there is a unique satisfier of the description in each event.
But notice that because the bishops bless each other, it appears there is no unique individual that satisfies either description in the consequent of This class of problems, sometimes called bishop sentences , has yielded a number of proposed solutions. For example, Elbourne has argued that the minimal situation story can suffice if there are subsituations containing only one bishop.
Here is a crude version of the idea: If there is a subsituation s1 with only one bishop and a subsituation s2 with one different bishop, there could be a containing situation s0 in which the bishops from those subsituations bless each other see Kroll and Elbourne , for further discussion. An alternative idea is to treat the pronoun in these cases as semantically akin to an indefinite description rather than a definite description. See Groendijk and Stokhof , Chierchia , van der Does , and also see van Rooy for criticism.
The proposal in King has a similar effect. Of course, as Kadmon stressed, pronouns typically do appear to introduce uniqueness, as an example like 25 shows.
What this means is that whatever account we give of pronouns—through dynamic semantics or whatever—we will want to account for this variation in interpretation in a principled way. We want to know precisely why a pronoun looks like a definite description here, but an indefinite description there. Whether extant accounts are satisfactory in this respect is subject to debate. Of course, none of this is to say that solving this problem will close the book on the analysis of descriptive pronouns.
A number of other puzzles remain, including the problem of pronominal contradiction, which has been discussed by Strawson , Davies , Ludlow and Neale , and van Rooy among many others.
Consider the following brief dialogue. Here, considerations about uniqueness implications are of little help. Whatever the ultimate disposition of these cases, it is fair to say that there are more issues here than whether pronouns are to be treated as standing proxy for definite descriptions or indefinite descriptions.
Most of the action in the philosophy of language has been with definite descriptions, but indefinite descriptions have also generated a fair bit of attention—some of it mirroring the debates about definite descriptions.
For example Chastain , Donnellan , Wilson , and Fodor and Sag , held that indefinite descriptions are ambiguous between referential and quantificational interpretations.
That is to say, there are referential and quantificational uses of indefinite descriptions and these are a reflex of a genuine semantical ambiguity. The basic structure of their argument was the following.
Referential uses of indefinites must be either a function of quantifier scope or a semantically referential indefinite determiner. Since indefinites with the relevant scopal properties would violate standard syntactic constraints, indefinites must in some cases be semantically referential. Examples of the kinds of syntactic considerations they had in mind include island constraints like the following. Quantified expressions are ordinarily considered to be clause bound. The Fodor and Sag argumentation was taken up in the philosophical literature by King and Ludlow and Neale , who argued that there is a confusion in the Fodor and Sag discussion.
Nor, of course, could a referential use be associated with wide scope, as Kripke argued forcefully—they simply are not the same phenomenon. The problem is that the Fodor and Sag arguments do not address the pragmatic account of referential uses, which of course was the alternative advanced by Kripke. In addition, there do appear to be more quantifier scope possibilities than the Fodor and Sag proposal seems to allow.
Consider 30 , from Ludlow and Neale and 31 from Kripke. Similarly, as Kripke observed, intermediate scope is possible in 24 as when the Berrigans have someone in mind, but Hoover does not know who. Similar observations about the possibility of intermediate scope have been made by Farkas , Rooth and Partee , King , Ruys and Abusch This free variable might then be picked up by some sort of discourse operator as discussed in the previous section.
This general strategy gives us some explanation for why indefinites sometimes appear to have island escaping properties as in cases like conditionals. This describes the DRT strategy only in the most general of terms, but we can already see that the questions that plague the Russellian story have their reflex here as well.
Everyone now recognizes that intermediate scope is a possibility in cases like 30 and 31 , but the question is just what mechanisms make it possible? The Russellian has to opt for operators with unusual island escaping properties. What is the DRT theorist to do? One option, explored by Reinhart , Kratzer , and Winter , employs the device of choice functions.
As Winter informally characterizes the doctrine, the idea is as follows. A2 An indefinite NP in an argument position, however, ends up denoting an individual, because the semantics involves a free function variable that assigns an individual to the restriction predicate. A3 This function variable is existentially closed, together with the restriction that it is a choice function: a function that chooses a member from any non-empty predicate it gets. How does this help in the case of intermediate scope?
For Reinhart , choice functions by themselves cannot account for the extant phenomena in particular cases of intermediate scope , so the theory must be supplemented with standard quantifier raising accounts as well.
Winter has offered a more general account employing choice functions also extending the account to plural indefinites that purport to make do without the additional resource of quantifier raising.
The interesting conceptual issue that arises, whether we opt for standard DRT accounts or such accounts supplemented with choice functions, is whether this departs from the Russellian analysis of indefinite descriptions in important ways. In one respect, of course, the accounts are very different—Russell takes indefinite descriptions to be existential quantifiers, while the DRT accounts take them to be akin to free variables.
On the other hand, once the free variables are interpreted the effect comes to very much the same thing: in both cases the accounts are fundamentally quantificational. Not everyone has seen DRT theory and choice functions in this light. On their view, using an expression with a particular individual in mind is not the same thing as referring to that individual. For example, according to Ludlow and Neale, there are a number of possible uses to which we can put indefinite descriptions, including referential uses, specific uses, definite uses, and purely existential uses.
To understand this distinction, consider the following cases. Referential use. A teacher announces the following to the class, with a single red haired student in the front row.
Specific use. In this case the teacher has singular grounds, and wishes to communicate that fact to the audience, but does not wish to communicate the identity of the cheater to the class. Definite use : In this case the teacher knows that there must have been a unique cheater, but does not know the identity of the cheater and hence does not have singular grounds for the utterance and accordingly is not in a position to communicate the identity of the cheater except under extraordinary circumstances.
Fortunately there only appears to be one cheater. Purely quantificational use : In this instance not only does the teacher fail to know the identity of the cheater, but also fails to know whether or not there was a unique cheater perhaps there were several.
The answer sheet was stolen from my office. Hopefully, there was only one student involved. We will know more pending an investigation. According to Ludlow and Neale, it is implausible to think that all of these uses can be chalked up to semantic facts. In each case, the proposition expressed is argued to be that which would be expressed if the indefinite determiner were replaced by the existential quantifier.
The different uses of descriptions then stem from the application of Gricean principles of conversational implicature to what was literally said. So far we have discussed singular definite and indefinite descriptions and the possibility that names are descriptions but as it turns out these types of descriptions are probably not the most commonly occurring descriptions in English.
The question is whether each of these constructions must be treated in a different way, or whether it is possible to unify their treatment with the analysis of definite descriptions discussed above. Sharvy suggested that a unified treatment is indeed possible this is also a possibility that Chomsky saw. If natural kinds like species and sub-species can bear the parthood relation to one another, then one can extend the Sharvy parthood operator to these cases as well. It really does seem as though singular, plural, mass, and generic descriptions are not so different in kind.
A unified Russellian treatment of the constructions seems possible. In section 7 we will return to the question of whether the maximality claim should be part of the analysis or whether it represents a weakness in the analysis.
The theory of descriptions has encountered its fair share of criticism. This criticism has ranged from contentions that Russell simply got the truth conditions wrong in important cases to nagging worries about the details of the proposal—in particular worries relating to the nature of the descriptive content. As we will see, none of these concerns have been completely ameliorated. If there is no present king of France, then an utterance containing such an expression is somehow defective. If the expressions fail to refer, then there is a presupposition failure and the utterance fails to have a determinate truth value.
Notice that this sort of failure is not supposed to undermine the meaningfulness of the sentences that we utter; for Strawson, sentences are meaningful in and of themselves, independently of the utterance situation. Utterances of meaningful sentences may be true or false or, if here is a presupposition failure, they may be neither. Does this whole debate come down to a case of intuition swapping?
Thomason ; and Soames ; seemed to think so, and Strawson himself also came to doubt whether the entailment vs. But truth value judgments for cases like this are extremely sensitive. Lasersohn , von Fintel , Yablo , and Schoubye , have collected a number of examples where subtle changes to the example give rise to different judgments of truth value. Von Fintel and Yablo offer an explanation for these minimal pairs that draws upon the nature of belief revision.
These are the cases where we judge the sentence false. We typically believe that Anna Karenina was written by Tolstoy, who was not and is not the king of France, but do we really have a belief in which the king of France was not a bald Nazi? Where would that belief come from? That seems implausible. More significantly, Schoubye observes that with some modest contextual framing the truth value judgments on these examples can flip.
Here Schoubye suggests that our truth value judgments firm up and flip from being indeterminate to being clear judgments of falsity. The literature on presuppositional accounts of definite descriptions has become vast, although not entirely uniform in its criticism of Russellian doctrine. Different presuppositional accounts have targeted different parts of this package, arguing that the relevant component is not entailed but is presupposed.
For example, begining with Strawson and the work cited above, we have numerous writers arguing that the existence claim is presupposed. The idea that uniqueness is presupposed is suggested in work by Heim , von Fintel , Elbourne , , Rothschild , and Schoubye It is possible to understand Cooper , Heim , Chemla , Schlenker , and Romoli as holding that the maximality component is presupposed. Combinations are possible. The idea that both the existence claim and the uniqueness claim is presupposed can be attributed to Abbott , Hawthorne and Manley and Schoubye , among others.
Donnellan observed that there is a sense in which Strawson and Russell are both right and both wrong about the proper analysis of descriptions. He argued that definite descriptions can be used in at least two different ways. In effect, we might take Donnellan as saying that in some cases descriptions are Russellian and in some cases they are Strawsonian.
Kripke responded to Donnellan by arguing that the Russellian account of definite descriptions could, by itself, account for both referential and attributive uses; the difference between the two cases could be entirely a matter of pragmatics.
Here is the idea: Grice showed us that there is an important distinction to be made between what one literally says by an utterance and what one intends to communicate what one means by that utterance. Kripke gave several reasons for thinking that this Gricean solution was preferable to an ambiguity thesis.
One reason was a general methodological point that one should not introduce ambiguities blithely—doing so is a kind of philosophical cheat. Kripke noted that the distinction even applies to uses of proper names.
So, for example, consider the case where I see a man in the distance raking leaves. I take the man to be Jones but it is actually Johnson. Now what I have literally said is that Jones is working up a sweat, but what I have communicated what I meant is something about Johnson.
It appears to be exactly the same phenomenon. At the same time there is some pull to say that in such a case one is saying something false too. We can say that this is a case where what we literally said was false, but that what we intended to communicate—the proposition meant—was true. The two-level theory thus accounts for our conflicting intuitions. Again we are ambivalent about the truth of what I say, and as Neale ; 91—93 observed, the distinction between the proposition literally expressed and the proposition meant allows us to understand why.
In this case, the proposition literally expressed is true, but what I intend to communicate is mistaken. For example, there remains a difficulty that Ludlow and Segal have called the residue of the problem of misdescription. Consider a case where we are at the crime scene, and unbeknownst to Detective Brown there is not one murderer but several—suppose there were several perpetrators and they were all mad members of an evil cult.
Again we are in two minds about the matter but this time the distinction between what is literally said and what is meant is no help. Unfortunately, that seems to be precisely what the Russellian theory of descriptions is committed to. One strategy for dealing with this problem is that the context may provide us the means to flesh out the description. For example, perhaps descriptions can be fleshed out appropriately if we allow implicit spatiotemporal locating expressions to be inserted into the description.
One problem with strategies of this nature is that there fails to be a principled basis in the terminology of Devitt and Sterelny for determining what the content of these descriptions is to be. Is it to be a description that the speaker has in mind? Is this description really sufficient to uniquely identify the object in question? Is it always clear that the speaker has a description in mind? Neale has argued that whatever we may want to say about the problem of incompleteness, it is not very effective as an argument for the referential analysis of descriptions.
But by hypothesis this case is a canonical example of an attributive use of a definite description. No reference is possible, so how can appeal to reference bail us out? How can any of this be an argument for definite descriptions being semantically referential?
Even stronger, it appears that there are numerous examples involving quantified expressions that suffer the same fate as incomplete descriptions. Devitt , and Reimer have argued that these cases are genuinely different in kind. Their idea is that since definite descriptions are regularly used to express singular thoughts, it stands to reason that the standard meaning of the definite description must be referential. Schoubye , ch. Alternatively, some writers have argued that that the problem of incomplete definite descriptions can be accounted for if we pursue an appropriate theory of quantifier domain restriction.
Their proposal is applicable to all quantified expressions; not just the theory of descriptions. See Bach , Neale b , and Lepore for a more general dicussion of the proposal. Consider cases like But one wonders how legitimate a domain-shift analysis is here. What would count as independent evidence either for, or against, a domain-shift taking place? As noted in the beginning of this article, the Russellian account of descriptions not only offers a quantificational as opposed to a referential account of descriptions, but it packs three different claims into the analysis of descriptions: an existence claim , a uniqueness claim , and a maximality claim.
As we will see, all of these claims can be put under pressure, and all three arguably collapse under that pressure. The motivation for this idea would be as follows. Very few natural languages have what we would recognize as definite and indefinite descriptions. Perhaps there is a single logical element or perhaps just a free variable with different pragmatic application conditions.
Indeed, many synonyms customarily are put to different uses. The idea advanced by Ludlow and Segal, however, is that this slender bit of information, combined with Gricean principles, is sufficient to generate the uniqueness implication that is carried by a definite description.
That is, an existential claim that there is an F that is G, plus a signal that this is given information, is often enough to allow us to implicate that there is unique F that is G. As we will see, the unified treatment of definite and indefinite descriptions may provide us an entering wedge for cracking open these puzzles. There is a sense in which Brown spoke falsely, but there is also clearly some pull for us to say that what he said was true. As we saw in section 4, the distinction between the proposition literally expressed and the proposition meant was not sufficient to account for this ambivalence on our part.
But according to Ludlow and Segal , if we combine this pragmatic distinction with the unified analysis of definite and indefinite descriptions there is something we can say about this last bit of residue. According to the unified analysis of descriptions, what Detective Brown literally expresses is not the idea that there was a unique murderer of Smith who is insane.
To the contrary, he literally expresses the proposition that there is at least one murderer of Smith who is insane. By applying Gricean principles in this context we have made out that Brown intends to say that there is a unique murderer of Smith and that he is insane. We are pulled in two directions by this case because what Brown has said is literally true but what he intended to communicate was, strictly speaking, false. In section 5. The idea is the following: What one literally expresses in 38 is that the hearer should put a book on a book.
Pragmatics helps us to make out that one book in particular is being spoken of, which book that is, and where it is to be moved. Although a unified approach is attractive, it has come under criticism from Abbott , , Horn and Abbott and Horn For example, Abbott argues that the pragmatic story in which the uniqueness of some descriptions is conversationally implicated fails because it predicts that the uniqueness implication should be cancellable, but according to Abbott, it is not.
Here we use the hash symbol to indicate a failed implicature cancellation. One response to this line of argument is that it frontloads our assumptions about written works having single authors. Is 40 any better? Contrast both with the following, which seems entirely natural.
This also raises the question of how far one can press the case based on examples like Abbott and Horn have suggested that the use of stress in descriptions highlights the uniqueness implications of the utterance.
Setting aside the question of whether these examples offer a case against familiarity, they are not, by themselves, evidence for uniqueness. For example, if 46 is asserting that there is a single unique German airline, it is clearly false, as there are many other German airlines, including Germanwings, Air Berlin, Germania, Hahn Air, and Air Hamburg. Abbot , recognizes that cases like this are false, but argues that what is going on is that the speakers are engaged in hyperbole.
That is, in 46 the speaker is literally saying there is only one German airline and we recognize this as an intentional falsehood, and then infer that the speaker means to communicate the airline is special in some way.
Platts ed. Reference , Truth , and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, — The Absorption Principle and E-type Anaphora. Geach, Peter [] Reference and Generality. Emended Edition. Groenendijk, Jeroen and Stokhof, Martin Dynamic Predicate Logic. Linguistics and Philosophy 14 , 39— Heim, Irene University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ann Arbor, University Microfilms. E-Type Pronouns and Donkey Anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 13 , — Artikel und Definitheit.
In: A. Wunderlich eds. Berlin; New York: de Gruyter, — Book Review: Stephen Neale Linguistics 32 , — Hilbert, David and Bernays, Paul [] Grundlagen der Mathematik.
II 2nd ed. Berlin; Heidelberg; New York: Springer. Hintikka, Jaakko Quantifiers vs. Quantification Theory. Linguistic Inquiry 5 , — Jespersen, Otto [] The Philosophy of Grammar. Kamp, Hans [] A Theory of Truth and Semantic Interpretation.
Groenendijk, T. Janssen and M. Stokhof eds. Truth, Interpretation and Information. Dordrecht: Foris, 1— Kripke, Saul [] In: S. Davis ed. Pragmatics: a Reader. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 77— While it is now widely acknowledged that, like the indexical expressions 'I', 'here', and 'now', definite descriptions in natural language are context-sensitive, there is significant disagreement as to the ultimate challenge this context-sensitivity poses to Russell's theory.
Yet general anthologies on logic and language can only include five or six selections, at most, on definite descriptions. Gary Ostertag's fine selection of readings provides upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and professional philosophers with a rich set of resources that will facilitate a detailed and engaged study of this key topic. Definite Descriptions: A Reader begins with three of Russell's own presentations of his theory, includes not only the classics by Strawson, Donnellan and Kripke, but also well-chosen papers from Carnap, Grice, Lambert, Peacocke, Soame and Wettstein, and ends with pieces by Neale and Schiffer that take the reader to the leading edge of current research.
This is an excellent and much needed collection of essential readings on definite descriptions. Ever since Russell, the subject of definite descriptions has been central to the philosophy of language. Gary Ostertag's excellent anthology brings together the classic writings on the subject and some of the most important recent work. The book will be an invaluable resource to all those working in the field.
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