Getting Straight on How Russell Underestimated Frege

Bertrand Russell in his essay On Denoting [1905] expounded a theory of description for natural language developed as a response to the theory of semantic relations in natural language, proposed by Gottlob Frege in his paper Uber Sinn und Bedeutung [1892]. That Russell presents Frege’s theory quite inadequately is a well-known and quite extensively investigated fact in the history of analytic philosophy. Some authors have stated that it is due to the fact that Russell was inclined to misrepresent other philosophers’ views by forcing them into his own template [Geach 1959, p. 72; Turnau 1991, p. 52]. Discussion of Russell’s objections to Frege’s theory takes the form of elaborated critique of Russell [e.g. Searle 1958; Geach 1959; Kitis 1984; Turnau 1991], as well as of Frege [e.g. Linsky 1967; Blackburn, Code 1978; Kitis 1984; Manser 1985]. Aiming at readers who wish to become generally acquainted with the issue of Russell’s misinterpretation of Frege, our overall goal is to present a lucid sketch of the flaws or oversights occurring in Russell’s On Denoting, in the context of Frege’s Uber Sinn und Bedeutung, to which Russell meant to refer. We will ground our depiction of Russell’s flaws on the two papers themselves. In more detail, we aim at: (1) providing