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Bertrand Russell: Sentences
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Retaining his ability to infuriate, Russell was imprisoned in 1961 with his fourth and final wife Edith Finch for taking part in a demonstration in Whitehall. The sentence was reduced on medical grounds to seven days in Brixton Prison.
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At the age of 88 Russell came to believe that a more radical strategy was needed, and he resigned from the CND to plan actions of civil disobedience through the Committee of 100. A sit-down demonstration took place at a US Polaris Base in which 20,000 people attended a rally and 5,000 sat down and risked arrest. On August 6, 1961 ("Hiroshima Day") they met at Hyde Park, and Russell illegally used a microphone. He was arrested and convicted of inciting the public to civil disobedience; his sentence was commuted to one week. Russell wrote eloquent leaflets and gave speeches for these and other demonstrations urging that the seriousness of nuclear peril justified nonviolent civil disobedience against the offending governments which are "organizing the massacre of the whole of mankind."
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Russell's solution was, first of all, to analyze not the term alone but the entire proposition that contained a definite description. "The present king of France is bald," he then suggested, can be reworded to "There is an x such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a present king of France, and x is bald." Russell claimed that each definite description in fact contains a claim of existence and a claim of uniqueness which give this appearance, but these can be broken apart and treated separately from the predication that is the obvious content of the proposition. The proposition as a whole then says three things about some object: the definite description contains two of them, and the rest of the sentence contains the other. If the object does not exist, or if it is not unique, then the whole sentence turns out to be false, not meaningless.[31]
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One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due originally to Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that it does. Strawson ... claims that a denoting phrase that does not, in fact, denote anything could be supposed to follow the role of a "Widgy's inverted truth-value" and expresses the opposite meaning of the intended phrase. This can be shown using the example of "The present king of France is bald". Taken with the inverted truth-value methodology the meaning of this sentence becomes "It is true that there is no present king of France who is bald" which changes the denotation of 'the present king of France' from a primary denotation to a secondary one.
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