ABSTRACT
J. S. Mill had used the verb ‘to denote’ as a synonym for ‘to name’ or ‘to mark’, whereas B. Russell thought of denoting in contrast to naming. While a proper name was always for him the subject of a proposition, or what a proposition is about, even if the proposition of which it is the subject is itself part of a more complex proposition, adjectives and verbs, he insisted, play quite a different role. ‘Russell’, he wrote, ‘found himself forced to say of some expressions which had been supposed to name or denote that they had to be given exceptional treatment’. Russell’s idea was that since what gets denoted are objects and objects are complexes of terms, in order to explain denoting we must first of all have at our disposal some means of symbolizing any term. Throughout the first part of the Principles Russell had struggled with F. H. Bradley’s problem of the unity of the proposition.
