Abstract

It is a remarkable fact about the early history of the analytic tradition that its three most important protagonists all held, at least during significant intervals of their respective careers, that there are entities that cannot be named. This shared commitment on the part of Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein is the topic of this thesis. I first clarify the particular form this commitment takes in the work of these three authors. I also illustrate a distinctive cluster of philosophical difficulties attending the view that there are unnameable entities, and explore the relationship between unnameability and inexpressibility. I then investigate what grounds there are for countenancing the unnameable, focussing in particular on the thesis that concepts cannot be named. I give a detailed hearing to four arguments for the unnameability of concepts discernible in, or suggested by, early analytic writings. The first and second arguments (chapters 3 and 4) are distinguishable in the locus classicus, Frege's 'On Concept and Object'. The first concerns the relationship between co-reference and intersubstitutability; the second concerns the unity of thought. The third argument (chapter 4) appeals to the alleged impossibility of expressing identities between objects and concepts, while the fourth (chapter 5) draws on considerations pertaining to diagonalization and Russell's paradox. I make the case that all four arguments fail to provide grounds for accepting the unnameable, contending that each argument can and should be resisted in defence of singular reference to concepts. In doing so I develop a novel defence of the view that absolutely any entity can be referred to with a singular term.