Is there a Problem with Incomplete Definite Descriptions?

Ernie Lepore

According to Russell (1905, 1919), definite descriptions are not singular referring terms. They are, instead, quantifier expressions, where any sentence of the form ‘The F is G’ is true just in case there is exactly one F and it is G. Critics and champions alike have fussed and fretted for well over fifty years about whether this treatment is compatible with certain alleged acceptable uses of incomplete definite descriptions, where ‘the F’ is incomplete just in case more than one object satisfies F, as in (1).

(1) The table is covered with books.

If Russell is right, it follows that unless every table but one is destroyed, each utterance of (1) is false. Yet utterances of (1) are often taken to be saying something true, even though everyone knows the world is table abundant. Since using incomplete descriptions need not compromise effective conversational exchange, how could Russell be right?

Some authors conclude he is not (Strawson (1950), Donnellan (1968), Devitt (1981), Wettstein (1981)), arguing that an utterance of (1) can say something true only when ‘the table’ is a singular term that refers to (and does not quantify over) a specific table. Yet even if right about some cases, this line cannot accommodate every acceptable use of an incomplete definite description, since some uses are of known incomplete descriptions without anything being even potentially referenced.

Stumbling upon a gruesomely mangled body, a detective exclaims (2).

(2) The murderer is insane.

The description ‘the murderer’ is incomplete, since murder is rampant. Yet our speaker need not have any murderer particular in mind. His attitude might be that, regardless of whoever committed this crime, what he expressed with his utterance of (2) is true, having based his assertion entirely on the state of the victim’s body, and not on particulars about the identity of whoever committed this crime. Explaining how these so-called attributive uses of incomplete descriptions (Peacocke, 1975, p.117, Davies, 1981, p.150; Recanati, 1986, p.67; Soames, 1986, p.278) can be used to say something true is the ultimate aim of this paper.

We will begin by canvassing and criticizing the two prominent sorts of semantic proposals that try to explain how someone can denote a la Russell with an incomplete description. The first tries to render incomplete descriptions denoting by showing how the nominal ‘F’ in ‘The F’ can be interpreted, in context, as elliptical for a richer (complete) one. The second subsumes incompleteness under a more general problem of domain selection – How can an utterance of ‘Everyone ate potatoes yesterday’ be true, since at least one person did not eat potatoes yesterday? – and then offers a general solution by showing how, in context, a domain of an apparently under specified quantifier can be delimited, with ‘the’ being a limiting case. Both sorts of proposals are semantic inasmuch as they try to render tokens of incomplete definite descriptions denoting, with true communications expressed. The other prominent sort of proposal we will consider concedes that every use of an incomplete description fails to denote, but argues that, just the same, true communications can result, with completion or reference occurring not at the level of what is expressed (‘what is said’), but at the level of what is (‘speaker’) meant or conveyed.

After critically discussing these various sorts of strategies, I will offer a suggestion for how to explain (away) intuitions that (mis)lead authors into seeing a problem with uses of incomplete descriptions in the first place. If my criticisms are sound, then all the current accounts avaiable seem to suffer from exceedingly high expectations of semantics or pragmatics.