A Research On The Description Theory Of Strawson

Name has always an important research subject of the logical philosophy.From Mill,Frege to Russell and Strawson,the development of name theory has more than 100 years history,when each of the name theories just likes a spray,which spring up and calm down constantly.The description theory proposed by Russell is a rare and beautiful flower in the course of the development of name theory.It has pushed up the name theory a new altitude and promoted the development of name theory even the language philosophy powerfully.But it has welcomed a stem challenge after several dozens years later.In the article "On Referring",a violent attack to Russell's theory has been carried on by Strawson,whose critique enabled the people to ponder the questions about description and name again.Beginning from the theory origins of description,this thesis has inspected description theories on Mill,Frege as well as Russell exhaustively.Upon this,some questions about Strawson's description theory has been analyzed enough and compared with Russell's correlative viewpoints.From these,the thesis points out the respective theoretical contributions and existing problems.In the last part of the thesis, it makes a comparison about viewpoints of Donellan and Strawson,and then makes a comment on the recent development of name theory.The thesis has been unfolded four parts.Chapter one is mainly a theoretical research on the concepts of the description and makes a brief introduction to its theoretical origins.The description theory comes from the name,mainly the proper name.This chapter has reviewed the development process of description theory,which indicates the name theory of Mill and Frege necessarily.These viewpoints have produced a great important influence on the name theory.Chapter two has described and analyzed Russell's description theory.From"the existence question" and "the Three Thorny Philosophical Problems",the thesis has elaborated the motivations and the guiding principles of this theory,then introduced the analysis method and the elimination rules,which has outlined its essential features of structurization and formalization.Furthermore,the effect and the difficulty of Russell's theory have also been pointed out here.Chapter three is the emphasis of the whole thesis.Based on the introduction to Strawson and the criticism for Russell's theory,this chapter mainly introduces and analyzes the description theory of Strawson.After that,it makes a brief analysis and a commentary on Russell's response.Besides,it has made a comment on all these viewpoints and pointed out their respective deficiencies.Strawson's theory is from the daily application of an expression and a sentence completely.On one hand,because context has been taken as a main factor to consider, the entire analytical process of Strawson has demonstrated pragmatics characteristic fully,In other words,the name theory has converted semantics into pragmatics after Strawson.This is a great leap forward and a contribution to the development of name theory.But,on the other hand,in his opinion,it is simply impossible to analyze the daily language precisely;therefore,he repels Russell's formalized analysis method. From a side,this reflects that his theory is restrained to the philosophy view of daily language completely,which may be a common deficiency of everyday-language group.For all this,Strawson's theory actually has brought a profound influence on the name theory's development,and has provided a new mentality and direction for the subsequent researches on name theory.Chapter four is complementary part.Comparing the theory of Strawson with Donellan's,the thesis has analyzed the same and different points of these two theories. Then the author gives a simple description on Historical Causal Naming Theory proposed by Kripke and recent trend of development on name theory.