Description Theory And Its Development

The world of philosophy has been tangled by the old Platonic riddle of non being for over two thousand years. Lots of philosophers had dedicated themselves to or ever tried to clear that problem, but nothing fruitful was achieved. Fortunately, with the rise of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language, the iceberg that ever covered "Non-Being" problem starts to crack. After the analysis of the meaning of language, Frege concluded that the concept of existence is essentially supposed to indicate that a word do have its applicable object. Then, Russell’s theory of Description may be seen as the paragon of solving this problem. With the help of modern mathematical logic, Russell explicated "existence" into something with the feature of propositional function. Definitely, the theory of Description is a tremendous advance in the history of philosophy and even play an important role in the development of mathematical logic. But, there are still something that can be improved, such as the contrast between description and proper name, the difference between meaning and referring, etc. After Russell, Quine developed the theory of Description and finally get to the conclusion that "To be is to be the value of bound variables". At this point, the old Platonic riddle of non being get cleared completely.This article,"Russell’s Theory of Description and Its Development", begins with the problem of "Non-Being" and ends up with the discussion of "existence". The ontological question has been clarified in great detail in this paper, so it can be seen as a ticket to the understanding of ontology. The discussion mainly consists of three parts. The first part shows the background of "non existence", which contains the explanation of the origin of the "Non-Being " and some philosophers’prior work to solve this puzzle. The second part will focus on Frege and Russell and their impressive achievement of how to crack this puzzlement. Meanwhile, a full explication of the origin and development of the theory of Description will be given. The third part talks about Quine revision of the Description Theory, and then sums up with the criteria of ontological commitment and selection.