The Theory of Descriptions

Russell was weaned off this promiscuous realism by G.E. Moore, who was a much more robust kind of realist. Russell addressed the question, how is it that we talk meaningfully about unicorns? For example, meaningfully say unicorns don't exist without getting ourselves into this minoncian difficulty. So what Russell had to do was to come up with an account of how we talk about things and seem to refer to things. But in fact, we're not referring to them because if it were a case of genuine reference, then there would have to be an actually existing thing out there that our reference succeeded in referring to. And this is what the theory