ABSTRACT
Gottlob Frege offered solutions to the puzzles by proposing that a name has a sense in addition to its referent, the sense being a "way of presenting" the term's referent. But he said far too little about what "senses" are and how they actually work. Bertrand Russell seems to have refuted the Referential Theory of Meaning for definite descriptions, by showing that descriptions are not genuinely singular terms. But one might naturally continue to think that ordinary proper names are genuinely singular terms. Yet the four puzzles—about nonexistents, negative existentials, and the rest—arise just as insistently for proper names as they did for descriptions. In fact, Russell maintains, they are equivalent to definite descriptions. Indeed he says they "abbreviate" descriptions, and he seems to mean that fairly literally. In support of the Theory of Descriptions, Russell gave a direct argument; then he touted the theory's power in solving puzzles.
