ARGUMENT AGAINST DIRECT REFERENCE
THE INFORMATIVENESS OF IDENTITY STATEMENTS
Premise 1: Statements such as “The morning star is the morning star.”
are not informative.
Premise 2: Statements such as “The morning star is the evening star.” are
informative.
Conclusion 1: The sentences do not have the same degree of
informativeness.
Premise 3: The meaning of any expression is its referent.
Conclusion 2: The sentence “The morning star is the morning star.” must
have the same meaning as the sentence “The morning star is
the evening star.”
Premise 4: If the referent of the morning star and the evening star is the
same, then the meaning of the sentence “The morning star is
the morning star.” should be identical to the meaning of the
sentence “The morning star is the evening star.”
Premise 5: If the two sentences have the same meaning, they should
have the same degree of informativeness.
Conclusion 3: These two sentences do not have the same meaning.
Conclusion 4: The meaning of an expression cannot be its referent.
RUSSELL’S COUNTERARGUMENT
Missing premise 6: The descriptions “the morning star” and “the evening star”
have meaning in virtue of the fact that they pick out objects in
the world.
Premise 7: The descriptions “the morning star” and “the evening star” do
not have meaning in virtue of the fact that they pick out
objects in the world. They do not pick out objects in the world
but contribute their meaning in other ways.
Conclusion 5: The argument against direct reference does not succeed.
