Definite Descriptions

SYMBOLIC LOGIC: QUANTIFIED PREDICATE LOGIC DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS A definite description is a description that uniquely describes an individual. For example, since there is only one capital of New Jersey, the description “the capital of New Jersey” picks out only one individual, the city of Trenton which is the capital of New Jersey. For a description to be a definite description, it almost always has to be prefaced with the word “the.” In addition, the description needs to be singular. For example, the description “the children” is not a definite description. We can represent definite descriptions with two parts, one part to represent the description, a predicate, and one part to represent the exclusivity of the description (“the”). For example, we can represent the descriptive part of “last president of the United States” with the capital letter “P” To represent the “uniqueness” part of the description, its definitiveness, we have a special operator called an iota operator, which is a mark we put in front of the variable in a quantifier to show that the description that accompanies the quantifier is a definite description. For example, (ix). For the last president of the United States we get: (ix)(Px) This is a descriptive phrase that picks out an individual. In other words, it is a singular term. However, this segment “(ix)(Px)” is not a sentence but only an open sentence, since it contains a quantifier x that is not bound by a determiner. To be a sentence it needs to be put in a predicate. MAKING SENTENCES Because definite descriptions pick out individuals, they appear to be singular terms, like proper names. As a result, we can treat them like singular terms when making sentences. For example, we can replace an instance of a free variable in an open sentence to make a complete sentence. For example, Jack is an author, where author is expressed by A The last president of the United States is an author. Px, where x means last president of the United States (ix)(Px) means the last president of the United States Aj A(ix)(Px) NON-REFERRING DESCRIPTIONS How are we to handle sentences that contain definite descriptions that have no referents? Are they meaningful? Do they have no truth value or are they false? Let us consider, for example, the following famous sentence “The present King of France is bald.” There is no present King of France. So how are we to evaluate the sentence containing a description of it? Alternative One The sentence has no truth value, Alternative Two The sentence has a truth value, because the condition of unique because it is meaningful, but reference is not satisfied. the sentence is false because the expression fails to refer. RUSSELL’S SOLUTION Russell thinks that there is a presupposition that there is a present King of France when we utter a sentence containing the description “the present king of France.” This is the presupposition: There is exactly one person who is the present King of France. But Russell’s response to the fact that it is not satisfied in certain sentences is that those sentences are false, not that they fail to have any truth value at all. Russell spells out the meaning of such a sentence as follows: (A) There is exactly one present King of France and (B) that man is bald. Then we break down “There is exactly one present King of France” into two parts: “There is at least …” and “There is at most …” In our terminology: (1) There is at least one present King of France (2) There is at most one present King of France (3) That person is bald. (1) ________ (2) ________________ (3) ____ (x)[(Kx & (y)(Ky  y = x)) & Bx] Given this meaning, the sentence will be false if any of the components are false. That is, the sentence will be false if: (a) If the description fails to refer (either because there is no object that meets the description or because there are more than one) or (b) because there is one object that meets the description but it fails to have the property being predicated of it. Contextual elimination of the definite description.