Definite description

Definite descriptions are the denoting phrases of the form 'the-so-and-so'. For example, 'the author of Waverley', 'the present king of France', 'the present president of India', 'the man with blue eyes', 'the book in my hand' and so on are definite descriptions. The meaning of 'the' in these phrases signifies that a definite object or individual has been referred to. Accordingly, 'the' is identified with 'one and only one' such that the sentence 'the present king of France is wise', for example, roughly means that there is at least one person who is king of France at present and there is at most one person who is king of France at present and that person is wise. As the first conjunct (there is at least one person who is king of France at present) is false, in Russellian analysis, the sentence 'the present king of France is wise' is also false.

Russell is concerned about the phrase 'the so-and-so'. Here the word "the" implies to a specific object or to an individual. There are various stages and modes where we find the word 'the' is in relation to the theory of acquaintance, such as; the teacher of Aristotle (Plato), Alexander the great, the Jagannath temple, etc. The level of acquaintance may extend to the level of description in some sense. It is so because though we assure ourselves about the fact, or an event, or a person, or an object only through the level of acquaintance, but most often we encounter some propositions those are not familiar to us. So, to understand the meaning of those propositions, we try to get the meanings of their constituent words by the theory of description which states that each word describes something about the worldly affairs, and hence there is a correspondence relation found between the meaning of a word and its referent. Once we know the meanings of constituent words of a sentence, we are acquainted with these words by principle and thus, we can obtain the meaning of the proposition. This suggests that whatever is known to us is ultimately due to the theory of acquaintance.