Introduction

We saw in Chapter 3 that Frege and Russell chose different strategies to deal with the Paradox of Identity. The problem for each was the informative character of definite descriptions. Frege (1892c) continued to regard both ordinary proper names as well as definite descriptions as belonging to the same syntactic category: both were Eigenname. He identified the informativeness of these expressions with the sense they expressed, but he does not appear ever to have attempted to link up this sense he attached to an Eigenname in any systematic way with the semantic role of predicate expressions. Is the sense attached to a proper name to be identified with a concept, or a combination of concepts, denoted by some corresponding predicate? This does not seem right, for concepts are extensionally equivalent while senses are not. Is the sense attached to a proper name to be identified with the sense of a predicate – and if so, how? These are issues Frege simply did not address. Russell (1905), however, met these issues head-on. He took the informativeness of definite descriptions as evidence that they were predicative in nature: he regarded their status as singular terms as a surface feature of what are at bottom, logically predicative constructions. Russell had a much more comprehensive theory of definite descriptions than Frege did, one that so struck the philosophical community that its very methodology served, in Ramsey's words, as a “paradigm of philosophy.”