Bibliographic record
Abstract
Russell's theory of descriptions was first published in his 1905 essay, “On Denoting”, which is surely one of the two or three most famous articles in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. It has been described as “a paradigm of philosophy”, and has been employed by many later analytic philosophers, such as Quine, although disputed by others, perhaps most notably Strawson. Writing in 1967, an astute commentator said: “In the forty-five years preceding the publication of Strawson's 'On Referring', Russell's theory was practically immune from criticism. There is not a similar phenomenon in contemporary analytic philosophy”. What is the theory which has excited such interest and acclaim? To put it briefly and more or less neutrally, it is a method of analyzing definite descriptions , also called singular descriptions , i.e., phrases, in English typically beginning with the word “the”, which pick out or purport to pick out a single (“definite”) object – e.g., “the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo”, or “the first President of the USA”. Many philosophers who have accepted the theory of definite descriptions, including Russell himself, have also treated some or all proper names in similar fashion. They are taken to be disguised definite descriptions, and then subjected to the same analysis as overt definite descriptions. Definite descriptions may be contrasted with indefinite descriptions, which do not purport to pick out any particular number of objects – e.g., “any President of the USA”. Note that while the two phrases “the even prime number” and “any even prime number” in fact direct our attention to the same object – the number two – the first is a definite description, while the second is an indefinite description.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".