ABSTRACT
Analytic philosophy of language today is host to a debate about the nature of names. A compositional semantic theory for a language will attribute a meaning to each and every meaningful atom of that language, and provide rules that explain how those meanings can compose to generate the meaning of a sentence. Strawson-Russell goes on to sound quite humbug about the fashion for ordinary language philosophy. Russell had advanced a theory about indexicals, which should form a central piece of any semantics for a natural language. It's easy to mistake a theory about the objects of assertion for a semantic theory. For instance, both types of theory will use the word 'meaning'. But one theory means by 'meaning' the object of assertion, or the constituents of a proposition. The compositional semantic value of an expression is identical to its assertoric content. Russell used the theory of descriptions to motivate his famous distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.
