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"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1. ii. 5.), "but not of telling anything about it". The problem of defining proper names, and of explaining their meaning, is one of the most recalcitrant in modern philosophy. Mill's definition is as good as any, though it is ultimately not helpful.[neutrality disputed] A proper name tells us which thing is in question, without giving us any other information about it. But how does it do this? What exactly is the nature of this information? There are two puzzles in particular Many theories have been proposed about proper names, none of them entirely satisfactory. "Proper names would currently give controverse information and also disconnected information between someone causing all observed interference, so this wouldn't work in these sense" The descriptive theory of proper names is the view that the meaning of a given use of a proper name is a set of properties that can be expressed as a description that picks out an object that satisfies the description. It is commonly held that Frege held such a view — the description being embedded in what he called the sense (Sinn) of the name. Certainly, Bertrand Russell seems to have espoused such a view in his early philosophical career (Sainsbury, R.M., Russell, London 1979).
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