ABSTRACT
Even if the Referential Theory of Meaning does not hold for all words, one might think it would apply at least to singular terms (terms that purport to refer to single individuals, such as proper names, pronouns, and definite descriptions). But Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell argued powerfully that definite descriptions, at least, do not mean what they mean in virtue of denoting what they denote. Rather, he contended, a sentence containing a definite description, such as “The woman who lives there is a biochemist,” has subject-predicate form only superficially, and is really-logically-a trio of generalizations: it is equivalent to “At least one woman lives there, and at most one woman lives there, and whoever lives there is a biochemist.”
