Page "Empty name" Paragraph 3
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He says that the sentence " Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep " obviously has a sense.
" Bertrand Russell may also have held a similar theory, that a proper name is a disguised definite description that signifies some unique characteristic.
The difficulty with this account is that we may always use a proper name to deny that the individual bearing the name actually has some characteristic feature.
But if " Aristotle " means " teacher of Alexander ", it would follow that this assertion is self-contradictory, which it is not.
Another difficulty is that different people may have different ideas about the defining characteristics of any individual.
The sole information carried by the name seems to be the identity of the individual that it belongs to.
As John Stuart Mill argued, a proper name tells us the identity of its bearer, without telling us anything else about it.
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