ABSTRACT
Ordinarily, when philosophers talk about descriptions, they have two kinds of expressions in mind: definite descriptions-understood to be phrases of the form ‘the F’ (and their equivalents in other languages), and indefinite descriptions-understood to be phrases of the form ‘an F’ (and their equivalents in other languages). As we will see, this way of carving up the kinds of descriptions is far too blunt. First, there are many kinds of expressions that appear to have this form but that are often argued not to be descriptions. For example, in the expression ‘John is a lawyer’ it is often claimed that ‘a lawyer’ is not a genuine description, but is rather something different-a predicate for example. Furthermore, it is arguable that there are many kinds of expressions having the surface form ‘the F’ but that nevertheless have semantical properties unlike “typical” descriptions. For example, there are generics (as in ‘The whale is a mammal’), and plurals (as in ‘The dogs are barking’).
