Summary Of Referring By Barcelonary Strawson

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In this paper I will discuss Strawson on the topic of Referring by Leonard Linksy and focusing on his chapter on Strawson on referring to help me distinguish between Russell’s theory on Propositions and Strawson’s on Statements. “Strawson uses a class of expressions that are broken up into ‘Singular demonstrative pronouns, proper names, singular personal pronouns and impersonal pronouns and phrases beginning with the definite article followed by a noun” (85).These are used in what Strawson calls a uniquely referring way to refer to people, places, objects and certain instances. Strawson distinguishes between an expression, its use and utterance and the same for sentences. With these he goes in depth as to how we use these to communicate, the Use of a sentence is important to Strawson’s theory. The use of the expression and sentence determines where the value of what is being uttered is true and if it is significant. He focuses on “use” of words. More specifically the uniquely referring use, a term he uses to describe referring to an individual, object, or idea. An example the sentences ‘the whale is a mammal’ and “the whale struck the ship”. “The Whale” in both the sentences have different uses when uttered. The whale is the first sentence isn't referring to a specific whale, it states that the whale as a species is a …show more content…

Russell’s theory revolves around propositions which hold to be true or false. Russell’s theory is that this applies to statements that are made, for example the sentence “The King of France is Wise” has to be either true or false. That if in the world when uttered there is a h a person that fits the description then it is true and vise versa. Strawson’s theory on the other hand relies on Statements, “though he doesn’t discuss the difference between statements and propositions himself” (90). Russell would

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