1.
REFERENCE
Does the reference take
place?
Some
of the words can be used to refer to things around us, and that other can be
used to describe what there is around us.
First,
a note of terminology, we should speak of referring expressions, among this are
‘john Smith’, ‘London’, ‘the present Queen of England’, ‘the girl I like’, ‘his
mother’ and ‘she’. It is best to think of referring expressions such the
examples above, and by way of contrast to other, non-expression, such as ‘if’,
‘happy’ or ‘a Queen’. These expression either make no possible to pretence at
referring, or do not serve to pick out just one person or thing. Anything
supposedly refer to is called by referring expression, a ‘particular’.
In
this section we will be concerned with expressions of the form ‘the so-and-so’,
let call the ‘ descriptive referring expression’. It would seem plain that
there are any number of genuine descriptive referring expressions serving to
pick out particulars. But it needs to be said, straight away, that some
expressions which have the form of referring expressions are not ones o this
sort at all. For example ‘the whale is a mammal’, if we say that the whale is a
mammal, we probably not talking about a particular whale in the sea. It is
actually called by stylistic variant.
So
it would be going too far to suppose that expressions of the form ‘the
so-and-so’ always serve as referring expressions. If we treated the vast
majority of expressions of this type, we find ourselves entangled in
intolerable paradoxes.
1. “the
first man born in a light bulb does not exist” : the first man born in a light
bulb is referring expression, it follows either that I am contradicting myself,
or that I am talking gibberish, when I say of him that he does not exist.
2. According
to Russell: Anything we say is either true, false, or meaningless. If ‘the
present king of France’ is a referring expression, it must be either true or
false of what is referred to that it has hair, or it must be meaningless to say
it has hair. We have already seen that it is neither true or false. Now surely
it is not meaningless, in any sense of meaningless we have encountered. So,
then ‘the present king of France’ cannot be a referring expression at all.
3. Russell’s
point: if both ‘(the A)’ and ‘(the B)’ refer to the same particular it cannot
make any difference to the truth value of what we say which of the expressions
we employ.
According
to Leibniz law, something can be no difference to the truth of what we say which
of two referring expressions having the same reference we employ.
