After Russell, After Meinong

May 21, 2007 (8:03 pm) reface AFTER RUSSELL, AFTER MEINONG Dale Jacquette Philosophy / Pennsylvania State U. University Park, pa 16802, usa dlj4@psu.edu The papers presented in this special issue commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Russell’s justly celebrated, much-discussed, but in many ways still enigmatic 1905 essay, “On Denoting”. They were selected from the papers delivered at a conference organized by Nicholas GriUn, Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre, and myself in May 2005. That meeting, “Russell versus Meinong: 100 Years after ‘On Denoting’z”, attracted about 100 philosophers from fourteen countries, presenting a total of 41 papers. Many of the essays delivered then and assembled here reXect special interests in Russell’s complex adversarial relation to Alexius Meinong’s object theory. Russell’s essay in many ways epitomizes the early ambitions of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. It is, as Frank C. Ramsey famously remarked, “that paradigm of philosophy”. It is a paradigm that continues to inform philosophical analysis in studies far aWeld of logic and semantics. Russell demonstrates a way of penetrating the surface grammar of a speciWc set of expressions with important philosophical implications and of systematically unpacking their component meanings. Like a beam of white light entering an optical prism, Russell breaks down sentences containing deWnite descriptions into distinct ontic, uniqueness andpredication constituents. Russell’s theoryofdeWnitedescriptions marks an important turning point in his philosophical development, as he breaks from his prior qualiWed admiration for Meinong’s Gegenstandstheoriez and rejects outright a semantic domain of beingless intended objects. The existence requirement in the Wrst clause of Russell’s analysis of deWnite descriptions marks a sharp departure for Russell toward the extensionalism that came to characterize his philosophy of logic and theory of meaning later in his career. The existence condition for deWnitely described objects has sparked the greatest controversy in the years since Russell published his analysis. By denying the possibility of referring to and truly predicating ordinary properties of nonexistent objects, Russell complicates the theory of referential meaning for false statements, works of Wction, mistaken scientiWc theories and hypotheses, and May 21, 2007 (8:03 pm) 6 Preface expressions of acts of fantasy and imagination. Where Meinong uniWes the semantics of all such commonplace feats of reference and predication, treating them as no diTerent than discourse about intended objects that happen to exist, Russell, from a contrary but also legitimate philosophical perspective, sharply divides the meaning of thought and language according to whether or not their ostensible objects actually exist. Russell’s prestige exerted a powerful inXuence ongenerations of philosophers. Their apprenticeship typically featured a close study of “On Denoting” to embrace a robust sense of realism by adopting semantic extensionalism, limiting reference to existent objects only. It became a part of this tradition also to ridicule Meinongianism, often without bothering to read Meinong’s writings, as Russell had with at least an initial dose of sympathy. The intentionalist tradition that continued the line of thought begun by Franz Brentano through Meinong and others was nevertheless not extinguished with the publication of Russell’s invaluable essay or subsequent criticisms in such works as Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. Many scholars since 1905 have doubted whether Russell has properly understood the logic and semantics of deWnite description, despite his name’s being so closely associated with the topic. More particularly, it has come increasingly to be questioned whether Russell accurately evaluates the prospects of Meinong’s admission of beingless intended objects to a semantic domain alongside existent physical spatiotemporal and abstract entities. Russell rejects Meinong’s semantic doctrine as logically incoherent in those applications in which we try to speak of an existent round square as being existent, round and square. By overlooking certain of Meinong’s key distinctions, Russell disputes Meinong’s central contribution to an intentionalist theory of mind and meaning , by which it is otherwise possible to refer to and truly predicate constitutive properties of non-existent as well as existent objects. These are among the principal topics explored by participants in the 2005 McMaster University conference. The papers collected from that meeting and edited for this special issue of Russell focus especially on the logic...

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