ABSTRACT
Russell seems to have refuted the Referential Theory of Meaning for definite descriptions, by showing that descriptions are not genuinely singular terms. Perhaps that is not so surprising, since descriptions are complex expressions in that they have independently meaningful parts. But one might naturally continue to think that ordinary proper names are genuinely singular terms. Yet the four puzzles-about nonexistents, negative existentials, and the rest-arise just as insistently for proper names as they did for descriptions.
