LE ROI DE FRANCE EST-IL CHAUVE?
IS THE KING OF FRANCE BALD?

Summary/Abstract: Is the King of France Bald? In 1892, Frege establishes the distinction between sense and denotation. Later on, in 1903, Russell deems the notion of sense as inconsistent. Indeed, if sense is defined as the donation of the object, what is the sense of sense in the absence of the object? Furthermore, how can we speak meaningfully (i.e. truly or falsely) of things that do not exist? The answer to these questions lies in the famous theory of descriptions which even though applicable to denotative expressions in the natural languages, it proposes an analysis which makes them liable to be logically significant. In my opinion, this is the main difficulty that an informed reader of Russell’s text has to overcome. Russell consider that a statement like Sherlock Holmes is a bachelor is logically false, even though any reader of Sir Conan Doyle’s stories knows it to be entirely true. Why is the logician’s logic opposed to the logic of common sense?

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