Definite description
A definite description is a denoting phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun that picks out a specific individual or object. For example: "the tallest student in the class", "the first monkey in space", "the 42nd President of the United States of America", and so forth.
The phrase the present King of France, the classical example of an unsatisfied definite description, comes from an example due to Bertrand Russell, an apparent paradox raising some interesting questions about the law of excluded middle, denotation, and so on.
France is a republic, and has no king. Consider the statement "The present King of France is bald." Is this statement true? Is it false? It is meaningless?
It surely can't be true, for there is no present King of France. But if it is false, then one would suppose that the negation of the statement is true, that is, "The present King of France has hair (is not bald)." But that doesn't seem any more true than the original statement.
Is it meaningless, then? One might suppose so (and some philosophers have--see below), because it certainly does fail to denote in a sense, but on the other hand it seems to mean something that we can quite clearly understand.
Russell, extending the work of Gottlob Frege, who had similar thoughts, proposed according to his 'theory of descriptions' that when we say "the present King of France is bald", we are making three separate assertions:
- there is an x such that x is the King of France
- there is no y, y not equal x, such that y is the King of France (ie. x is the only King of France)
- x is bald.
Since assertion 1. is plainly false, and our statement is the conjunction of all three assertions, our statement is false.
Similarly, for "the present King of France is not bald", we have the identical assertions 1. and 2. plus
- x is not bald
so "the present King of France is not bald", because it consists of a conjunction, one of whose terms is assertion 1. ("there is a King of France") is also false.
The law of the excluded middle is not violated because by denying both "the King of France is bald" and "the King of France is not bald," we are not asserting the existence of some x which is neither bald nor not bald, but denying the existence of some x which is the King of France.
However, though Russell's analysis has been widely accepted by philosophers, there has been some dissent.
P. F. Strawson, in particular, argued that Russell had misrepresented what one means when one says "The present King of France is bald." According to Strawson, this sentence is not contradicted by "No one is the present King of France," for the former sentence contains not an existential assertion, but attempts to use "the present King of France" as a referring (or denoting) phrase. Since there is no present King of France, the phrase fails to refer, and so the sentence is neither true nor false, but meaningless.
A fine resolution to the dispute between Russell and Strawson is provided by
philosophy of language --
Analytic philosophy --
Bertrand Russell --
P. F. Strawson --
Theory of descriptions
