ABSTRACT
Russell purports to solve the problems set by Frege without positing a second level of meaning, which Frege called the level of sense. He first proposes his famous theory of definite descriptions. All complex singular terms can be written as ‘The F’, and any sentence containing ‘The F’ is of the form ‘The F is G’. ‘The F is G’ is equivalent to ‘There is one and only one thing such that it is F, and all F are G’. Second, he claims that all ordinary proper names are really definite descriptions in disguise; they abbreviate them. This enables him to claim that singular terms which refer to the same object need not mean the same, and if they refer to nothing they can still be meaningful.
For Russell, the only genuine logically proper names – ones that cannot be analysed as disguised definite descriptions – are ones standing for sense-data (and possibly for the self). More generally, Russell propounds his famous distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description; the crucial principle is his principle of acquaintance: any proposition we can understand must be composed entirely of entities with which we are acquainted.
