Mike Chase writes: 'However, not even Russell would have been wacko enough to suggest, as jlsperanza does, that the latter of these phrases [sc. "The king of France is bald"] implies that "something like the king of France exists.' I like the implicature of 'not even' here, but alas, Russell did think that unanalyzed, this proposition implied [illicitly] exactly that; hence his disagreement with Meinong over whether statements such as 'The Golden Mountain does not exist.' implied that there was something of which it was _predicated_ that it didn't exist. In one of the most famous philosophical papers of the 20th century ['On Denoting,' Mind, 1905], Russell wrestled the solution of this problem away from those who believed that in order to speak of that which is not we must speak about something. 'On Denoting' is online at http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/russell_on_denoting.htm Here's a brief excerpt. Now it is plain that such propositions [as 'The King of France is bald, e.g.] do not become nonsense merely because their hypotheses are false. The King in The Tempest might say, `If Ferdinand is not drowned, Ferdinand is my only son'.' Now `my only son' is a denoting phrase, which, on the face of it, has a denotation when, and only when, I have exactly one son. But the above statement would nevertheless have remained true if Ferdinand had been in fact drowned. Thus we must either provide a denotation in cases in which it is at first sight absent, or we must abandon the view that denotation is what is concerned in propositions which contain denoting phrases. The latter is the course that I advocate. The former course may be taken, as Meinong, by admitting objects which do not subsist, and denying that they obey the law of contradiction; this, however, is to be avoided if possible. Another way of taking the same course (so far as our present alternative is concerned) is adopted by Frege, who provides by definition some purely conventional denotation for the cases in which otherwise there would be none. Thus `the King of France', is to denote the null-class; `the only son of Mr. So-and-so' (who has a fine family of ten), is to denote the class of all his sons; and so on. But this procedure, though it may not lead to actual logical error, is plainly artificial, and does not give an exact analysis of the matter. Thus if we allow that denoting phrases, in general, have the two sides of meaning and denotation, the cases where there seems to be no denotation cause difficulties both on the assumption that there really is a denotation and on the assumption that there really is none. ------------------------------ This, of course does not reveal Russell's solution, but it will surely lead readers to pursue the matter. Robert Paul Reed College 'What is there?' asks Quine, and answers, 'Everything.' ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html