ABSTRACT
It used to be widely held that the syntactical simplicity of proper names is misleading, that names are just abbreviations, in some sense or other, for certain other expressions, whose referential mechanism is clearer. The most prominent such theory, sometimes attributed to Frege and Russell, holds that the expressions for which proper names go proxy are definite descriptions, like “the man who taught Alexander the Great” or “the capital of France”. While not without problems of its own, this description theory of names has a great intuitive appeal, and yields a beautifully unified account of the phenomenon of singular reference.
