Abstract

As Gideon Makin introduces his book, it may seem that his concerns are primarily historical and negative—namely, to show that when properly understood, Russell’s “On Denoting” and Frege’s “On Sense and Reference” make little, if any, contact with issues in contemporary philosophy of language. First, he claims that these papers are not typically understood in the context of the philosophical development of their authors. Russell’s central argument in “On Denoting”—the so-called “Gray’s Elegy argument”—is directed against the theory of denoting concepts he advocated in The Principles of Mathematics, while Frege begins “On Sense and Reference” by arguing against his Begriffsschrift account of identity. And, for Makin, without a proper understanding of the old theories which are being rejected, and the reasons why they are being rejected, we will lack a full understanding of the new theories which are being advocated. More generally, he claims that when we understand the theoretical context in which Russell and Frege are operating, we will recognize that they are engaged in an “enterprise which is radically different in kind from what current practitioners of the philosophy of language profess to be doing”, an enterprise which arises out of their logicist project, which, in turn, is tied to their “peculiarly metaphysical conception of logic”.