Defending Russell’s Theory of Definite Descriptions Against a Strawsonian Attack
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although Russell’s theory of definite descriptions is highlyappreciated in the area of philosophy of language, it has faced some objections from different angles. One of the major objections is known as the objection arising from incomplete definite descriptions. According to this objection, a speaker by his/her utterance of a sentence containing an incomplete definite description often succeeds in saying something true despite the fact that such a sentence always expresses a false proposition. This particular objection against Russell’s theory arises because of an ignorance concerning the distinction between the meaning of a sentence and the assertion made by a speaker by using that sentence in a particular context. To address this distinction between meaning and assertion Scott Soames’ theory concerning the connection between meaning and assertion has been adopted. With the help of this theory, it has been shown that the problem arising from incomplete definite descriptions does not pose a genuine threat to Russell’s theory. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#73-74; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2023 P 317-336
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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 | 0.022 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".