ABSTRACT
Later writers, especially Wisdom, distinguished weak and strong senses of ‘incomplete symbol’. A symbol was incomplete in a weak sense if (i) it purported to refer to something, (ii) the sentence containing it would be replaced, in a proper logical language, by sentences not containing it, but (iii) these new sentences would only be true, in simple affirmative cases, if the thing apparently referred to did indeed exist. If ‘The present king of France is bald’ is analysed by the theory of DESCRIPTIONS, ‘the present king of France’ is an incomplete symbol in a weak sense. A symbol was incomplete in a strong sense if (i), like ‘the average man’, it disappeared when the sentence containing it was properly reformulated, but (ii) the reformulated version could be true, in simple affirmative cases, even though what the symbol apparently referred to did not exist (no man with 2.4 children exists). ‘Logical construction’ (or ‘construct’) was thereafter kept for what incomplete symbols in a strong sense purported to refer to, i.e. the average man, but not the present King of France, would be a logical construction. There is, however, a complication: Moore held that if ‘the average man’ is an incomplete symbol, then so is ‘has 2.4 children’; but this latter does not seem, straightforwardly, to involve a logical construction.
