Intensional logic behind the Gray’s Elegy Argument

Abstract

The dense passage in ‘On Denoting’, often called the Gray’s Elegy Argument, is directed against the view that each definite description is associated with two semantic items—what Bertrand Russell calls ‘meaning’ and ‘denotation’. It is possible to interpret the passage as a single, coherent argument against the view, if we attribute to him the notion that the relation of meaning to denotation must hold within what I call a multifaceted object. In this paper, I offer a sketch of the interpretation we can thus obtain, before I attempt to explicate the notion of multifaceted objects by offering a semantics for them. I illustrate some features of the semantics by showing that a version of many-sorted, intensional logic is sound and complete with respect to the semantics. I conclude the paper by presenting how the semantics can be used to interpret some remarks in the GEA.