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The discovery of the twin categories of reference and singular thought is widely felt to be one of the landmark achievements of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. On the one hand there is the distinction between bona fide referential expressions of natural language and those that are about objects only in some looser sense. On the other hand there is a corresponding distinction between a thought that is loosely about an object, and one whose bond with an object is robust enough for it to count as genuinely ‘singular’ or ‘de re’. This chapter tries to shed light on these two ideas by focusing on semantic ideas connected with Russell’s category of logically proper names that have been widely brought to bear on their successors.

Russell famously argued that existence is a second-level concept, applying exclusively to properties. Of course, singular existence claims are ubiquitous and apparently fully intelligible, but this poses no immediate problem for Russell since, on his view, names abbreviate descriptions. Thus, to say that Churchill exists is to say that the F exists, for some predicate F uniquely instantiated by Churchill. Russell, however, did also allow for genuine proper names—names of sense-data. These refer directly, with no mediating description. What Russell failed to notice is that we can use such names to assert existence. However, here we cannot account for the meaningfulness of the assertion consistent with Russell’s approach: the sense-datum name does not abbreviate any description, and so the existence claim cannot be analyzed as a second-level predication. But then even Russell must acknowledge singular existence claims.

This chapter focuses on Bertrand Russell and his remark that “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” Russell, however, may not live up to his own good advice. In the series of lectures in which this passage is found, Russell begins the exposition of his chief thesis, the legitimacy of analysis, with a discussion of facts, propositions, symbols, and relations. He proceeds to a discussion of logically proper names, in the course of which he asserts that facts corresponding to statements about names like Piccadilly contain no constituent corresponding to Piccadilly, which can be reduced to a series of classes of material entities.