DESCRIPTIONS AND INCOMPLETE SYMBOLS I am proposing to deal this time with the subject of descriptions,

and what I call “incomplete symbols”, and the existence of described individuals. You will remember that last time I dealt with the existence of kinds of things, what you mean by saying

“There are men” or “There are Greeks” or phrases of that sort, where you have an existence which may be plural. I am going to deal today with an existence which is asserted to be singular, such as “The man with the iron mask existed” or some phrase of that sort, where you have some object described by the phrase

“The so-and-so” in the singular, and I want to discuss the analysis of propositions in which phrases of that kind occur.

There are, of course, a great many propositions very familiar in metaphysics which are of that sort: “I exist” or “God exists”

or “Homer existed”, and other such statements are always occurring in metaphysical discussions, and are, I think, treated in ordinary metaphysics in a way which embodies a simple logical mistake that we shall be concerned with today, the same sort of mistake that I spoke of last week in connection with the existence of kinds of things. One way of examining a prop-osition of that sort is to ask yourself what would happen if it were false. If you take such a proposition as “Romulus existed”, probably most of us think that Romulus did not exist. It is obvi-ously a perfectly significant statement, whether true or false, to say that Romulus existed. If Romulus himself entered into our statement, it would be plain that the statement that he did not exist would be nonsense, because you cannot have a constituent of a proposition which is nothing at all. Every constituent has got to be there as one of the things in the world, and therefore if Romulus himself entered into the propositions that he existed or that he did not exist, both these propositions could not only not be true, but could not be even significant, unless he existed. That is obviously not the case, and the first conclusion one draws is that, although it looks as if Romulus were a constituent of that proposition, that is really a mistake. Romulus does not occur in the proposition “Romulus did not exist”.

Suppose you try to make out what you do mean by that proposition. You can take, say, all the things that Livy has to say about Romulus, all the properties he ascribes to him, including the only one probably that most of us remember, namely, the fact that he was called “Romulus”. You can put all this together, and make a propositional function saying “x has such-and-such properties”, the properties being those you find enumerated in Livy. There you have a propositional function, and when you say

that Romulus did not exist you are simply saying that that propositional function is never true, that it is impossible in the sense I was explaining last time, i.e. that there is no value of x that makes it true. That reduces the non-existence of Romulus to the sort of non-existence I spoke of last time, where we had the non-existence of unicorns. But it is not a complete account of this kind of existence or non-existence, because there is one other way in which a described individual can fail to exist, and that is where the description applies to more than one person. You cannot, e.g., speak of “The inhabitant of London”, not because there are none, but because there are so many.

You see, therefore, that this proposition “Romulus existed” or

“Romulus did not exist” does introduce a propositional function, because the name “Romulus” is not really a name but a sort of truncated description. It stands for a person who did such-and-such things, who killed Remus, and founded Rome, and so on. It is short for that description; if you like, it is short for “the person who was called ‘Romulus’ ”. If it were really a name, the ques-tion of existence could not arise, because a name has got to name something or it is not a name, and if there is no such person as Romulus there cannot be a name for that person who is not there, so that this single word “Romulus” is really a sort of truncated or telescoped description, and if you think of it as a name you will get into logical errors. When you realize that it is a description, you realize therefore that any proposition about Romulus really introduces the propositional function embody-ing the description, as (say) “x was called ‘Romulus’ ”. That introduces you at once to a propositional function, and when you say “Romulus did not exist”, you mean that this prop-ositional function is not true for one value of x.

There are two sorts of descriptions, what one may call

“ambiguous descriptions”, when we speak of “a so-and-so”, and what one may call “definite descriptions”, when we speak of

“the so-and-so” (in the singular). Instances are:

(It is not necessary for a description that it should describe an individual: it may describe a predicate or a relation or anything else.)

It is phrases of that sort, definite descriptions, that I want to talk about today. I do not want to talk about ambiguous descrip-tions, as what there was to say about them was said last time.

I want you to realize that the question whether a phrase is a definite description turns only upon its form, not upon the ques-tion whether there is a definite individual so described. For instance, I should call “The inhabitant of London” a definite description, although it does not in fact describe any definite individual.

The first thing to realize about a definite description is that it is not a name. We will take “The author of Waverley”. That is a definite description, and it is easy to see that it is not a name.

A name is a simple symbol (i.e. a symbol which does not have any parts that are symbols), a simple symbol used to designate a certain particular or by extension an object which is not a particular but is treated for the moment as if it were, or is falsely believed to be a particular, such as a person. This sort of phrase,

“The author of Waverley”, is not a name because it is a complex symbol. It contains parts which are symbols. It contains four words, and the meanings of those four words are already fixed and they have fixed the meaning of “The author of Waverley” in the only sense in which that phrase does have any meaning. In that sense, its meaning is already determinate, i.e. there is Ambiguous: A man, a dog, a pig, a Cabinet Minister.

Definite: The man with the iron mask.

The last person who came into this room.

The only Englishman who ever occupied the Papal See.

The number of the inhabitants of London.

The sum of 43 and 34.

nothing arbitrary or conventional about the meaning of that whole phrase, when the meanings of “the”, “author”, “of”, and

“Waverley” have already been fixed. In that respect, it differs from

“Scott”, because when you have fixed the meaning of all the other words in the language, you have done nothing towards fixing the meaning of the name “Scott”. That is to say, if you understand the English language, you would understand the meaning of the phrase “The author of Waverley” if you had never heard it before, whereas you would not understand the meaning of “Scott” if you had never heard the word before because to know the meaning of a name is to know who it is applied to.

You sometimes find people speaking as if descriptive phrases were names, and you will find it suggested, e.g., that such a proposition as “Scott is the author of Waverley” really asserts that

“Scott” and the “the author of Waverley” are two names for the same person. That is an entire delusion; first of all, because “the author of Waverley” is not a name, and, secondly, because, as you can perfectly well see, if that were what is meant, the proposition would be one like “Scott is Sir Walter”, and would not depend upon any fact except that the person in question was so called, because a name is what a man is called. As a matter of fact, Scott was the author of Waverley at a time when no one called him so, when no one knew whether he was or not, and the fact that he was the author was a physical fact, the fact that he sat down and wrote it with his own hand, which does not have anything to do with what he was called. It is in no way arbitrary. You cannot settle by any choice of nomenclature whether he is or is not to be the author of Waverley, because in actual fact he chose to write it and you cannot help yourself. That illustrates how “the author of Waverley” is quite a different thing from a name. You can prove this point very clearly by formal arguments. In “Scott is the author of Waverley” the “is”, of course, expresses identity, i.e. the entity whose name is Scott is identical with the author of Waverley. But, when I say “Scott is mortal” this “is”, is the “is” of predication,

which is quite different from the “is” of identity. It is a mistake to interpret “Scott is mortal” as meaning “Scott is identical with one among mortals”, because (among other reasons) you will not be able to say what “mortals” are except by means of the propositional function “x is mortal”, which brings back the

“is” of predication. You cannot reduce the “is” of predication to the other “is”. But the “is” in “Scott is the author of Waverley” is the “is” of identity and not of predication.⁷

If you were to try to substitute for “the author of Waverley” in that proposition any name whatever, say “c” so that the prop-osition becomes “Scott is c”, then if “c” is a name for anybody who is not Scott, that proposition would become false, while if, on the other hand, “c” is a name for Scott, then the proposition will become simply a tautology. It is at once obvious that if “c”

were “Scott” itself, “Scott is Scott” is just a tautology. But if you take any other name which is just a name for Scott, then if the name is being used as a name and not as a description, the proposition will still be a tautology. For the name itself is merely a means of pointing to the thing, and does not occur in what you are asserting, so that if one thing has two names, you make exactly the same assertion whichever of the two names you use, provided they are really names and not truncated descriptions.

So there are only two alternatives. If “c” is a name, the prop-osition “Scott is c” is either false or tautologous. But the proposition “Scott is the author of Waverley” is neither, and there-fore is not the same as any proposition of the form “Scott is c”, where “c” is a name. That is another way of illustrating the fact that a description is quite a different thing from a name.

I should like to make clear what I was saying just now, that if you substitute another name in place of “Scott” which is also a name of the same individual, say, “Scott is Sir Walter”, then

7The confusion of these two meanings of “is” is essential to the Hegelian conception of identity-in-difference.

“Scott” and “Sir Walter” are being used as names and not as descriptions, your proposition is strictly a tautology. If one asserts “Scott is Sir Walter”, the way one would mean it would be that one was using the names as descriptions. One would mean that the person called “Scott” is the person called “Sir Walter”, and “the person called ‘Scott’ ” is a description, and so is “the person called ‘Sir Walter’ ”. So that would not be a tautol-ogy. It would mean that the person called “Scott” is identical with the person called “Sir Walter”. But if you are using both as names, the matter is quite different. You must observe that the name does not occur in that which you assert when you use the name. The name is merely that which is a means of expressing what it is you are trying to assert, and when I say “Scott wrote Waverley”, the name “Scott” does not occur in the thing I am asserting. The thing I am asserting is about the person, not about the name. So if I say “Scott is Sir Walter”, using these two names as names, neither “Scott” nor “Sir Walter” occurs in what I am asserting, but only the person who has these names, and thus what I am asserting is a pure tautology.

It is rather important to realize this about the two different uses of names or of any other symbols: the one when you are talking about the symbol and the other when you are using it as a symbol, as a means of talking about something else. Normally, if you talk about your dinner, you are not talking about the word

“dinner” but about what you are going to eat, and that is a different thing altogether. The ordinary use of words is as a means of getting through to things, and when you are using words in that way the statement “Scott is Sir Walter” is a pure tautology, exactly on the same level as “Scott is Scott”.

That brings me back to the point that when you take “Scott is the author of Waverley” and you substitute for “the author of Waverley” a name in the place of a description, you get necessarily either a tautology or a falsehood—a tautology if you substitute

“Scott” or some other name for the same person, and a

false-hood if you substitute anything else. But the proposition itself is neither a tautology nor a falsehood, and that shows you that the proposition “Scott is the author of Waverley” is a different proposition from any that can be obtained if you substitute a name in the place of “the author of Waverley”. That conclusion is equally true of any other proposition in which the phrase “the author of Waverley” occurs. If you take any proposition in which that phrase occurs and substitute for that phrase a proper name, whether that name be “Scott” or any other, you will get a differ-ent proposition. Generally speaking, if the name that you substi-tute is “Scott”, your proposition, if it was true before will remain true, and if it was false before will remain false. But it is a different proposition. It is not always true that it will remain true or false, as may be seen by the example: “George IV wished to know if Scott was the author of Waverley.” It is not true that George IV wished to know if Scott was Scott. So it is even the case that the truth or the falsehood of a proposition is some-times changed when you substitute a name of an object for a description of the same object. But in any case it is always a different proposition when you substitute a name for a description.

Identity is a rather puzzling thing at first sight. When you say

“Scott is the author of Waverley”, you are half-tempted to think there are two people, one of whom is Scott and the other the author of Waverley, and they happen to be the same. That is obvi-ously absurd, but that is the sort of way one is always tempted to deal with identity.

When I say “Scott is the author of Waverley” and that “is”

expresses identity, the reason that identity can be asserted there truly and without tautology is just the fact that the one is a name and the other a description. Or they might both be descriptions.

If I say “The author of Waverley is the author of Marmion”, that, of course, asserts identity between two descriptions.

Now the next point that I want to make clear is that when a

description (when I say “description” I mean, for the future, a definite description) occurs in a proposition, there is no constituent of that proposition corresponding to that description as a whole.

In the true analysis of the proposition, the description is broken up and disappears. That is to say, when I say “Scott is the author of Waverley” it is a wrong analysis of that to suppose that you have there three constituents, “Scott”, “is”, and “the author of Waverley”. That, of course, is the sort of way you might think of analysing. You might admit that “the author of Waverley” was complex and could be further cut up, but you might think the proposition could be split into those three bits to begin with. That is an entire mistake. “The author of Waverley” is not a constituent of the proposition at all. There is no constituent really there corresponding to the descriptive phrase. I will try to prove that to you now.

The first and most obvious reason is that you can have significant propositions denying the existence of “the so-and-so”. “The unicorn does not exist.” “The greatest finite number does not exist.” Propositions of that sort are perfectly significant, are perfectly sober, true, decent propositions, and that could not possibly be the case if the unicorn were a constituent of the proposition, because plainly it could not be a constituent as long as there were not any unicorns. Because the constituents of propositions, of course, are the same as the constituents of the corresponding facts, and since it is a fact that the unicorn does not exist, it is perfectly clear that the unicorn is not a constituent of that fact, because if there were any fact of which the unicorn was a constituent, there would be a unicorn, and it would not be true that it did not exist. That applies in this case of descriptions particularly. Now since it is possible for “the so-and-so” not to exist and yet for propositions in which “the so-and-so” occurs to be significant and even true, we must try to see what is meant by saying that the so-and-so does exist.

The occurrence of tense in verbs is an exceedingly annoying

vulgarity due to our preoccupation with practical affairs. It would be much more agreeable if they had no tense, as I believe

vulgarity due to our preoccupation with practical affairs. It would be much more agreeable if they had no tense, as I believe