Why ‘Scott is the Author of Waverley’ Isn’t Just ‘Scott is Scott’
The King’s Question
In the 1820s, a secret hung over the bestselling Waverley novels: no one knew who wrote them. King George IV was desperate to learn if the famous poet Sir Walter Scott was the author. One evening, a clever friend might have asked: “Your Majesty, do you want to know whether Scott is Scott?” The king would have rolled his eyes. Of course not — he wanted to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley. But why is one question boring and the other exciting?
This puzzle grabbed the attention of E. E. C. Jones (1848–1922), a philosopher and logician at Cambridge University. Jones had to fight for her education: her brothers’ schooling came first, and she only entered college at age 27. Once there, she quickly became fascinated by a problem that sounds simple but turns out to be maddeningly deep: how can a sentence like “Scott is the author of Waverley” actually tell us something new, when it looks like it’s just saying that a thing is that thing?
The Paradox of “S is P”
To see why this matters, consider an ordinary claim: “Socrates is mortal.” What are you actually saying? The German philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) argued that you are trapped in a paradox. Either “Socrates is mortal” means the same as “Socrates is Socrates” — which is trivially true and tells you nothing. Or it means “Socrates is not-Socrates” — a blatant contradiction. Lotze thought any statement of the form S is P collapses into either empty identity or a logical mess.
If Lotze is right, then the huge majority of what we say is either a waste of breath or nonsense. That can’t be the whole story. Jones saw that something must be wrong with Lotze’s picture — but what?
Jones’s Bold Idea: Identity in Disguise
Jones proposed a simple but powerful fix. Every meaningful statement, she said, is actually an identity of denotation in diversity of intension. That sounds like a mouthful, but the idea is easy to grasp once you know two terms.
Denotation is what a word or phrase points to — the actual thing out in the world. Intension is the way of thinking about that thing, the description or concept you use to pick it out. “The morning star” and “the evening star” both denote the planet Venus, but they do so with very different intensions — one through a predawn sky, the other through a dusk sky. Learning that the morning star is the evening star tells you something real: you didn’t know those two descriptions reached the same object.
Jones’s Law of Significant Assertion states that whenever you say “S is P,” you are asserting that what S denotes is exactly what P denotes, even though S and P bring very different intensions to the party. That’s why “Scott is the author of Waverley” is genuinely informative. “Scott” denotes a person through his name and all the associations that come with it; “the author of Waverley” denotes that same person through the property of having written those novels. The sentence tells you that the person pointed to by the one description is the same person pointed to by the other.
Jones supported her view with everyday examples that a 12-year-old can appreciate right away. She pointed out that you might know all the inhabitants of a small village by sight and be able to greet them by name, yet be entirely unable to give a description of any of them. Or you might be able to recognize real diamonds from paste every single time, without being able to list the properties that make them different. In those cases, you grasp the denotation perfectly while the intension remains fuzzy. The opposite can also happen: you might have a detailed description of a rare plant but be completely unable to pick it out in a field. Intension and denotation often come apart, and that is exactly what makes language so useful.
Russell Fights Back
Jones’s work grabbed the attention of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Russell agreed that identity sentences could be informative, but he thought Jones had misunderstood what gives descriptions their power.
Russell argued that there is a deep difference between a simple name like “Scott” and a descriptive phrase like “the author of Waverley.” A name is, in his view, just a label — a noise or shape we agree to use for a person. A description, however, picks out an object through a logical structure. “The author of Waverley” is not a label you can slap on someone; it depends on the fact that there really is a person who wrote those novels. And that fact is not about words — it is about the world.
Russell then hit Jones with a clever argument. Suppose you treat “the author of Waverley” as having an intension — a meaning you can point to. Then the sentence “Scott is the author of Waverley” would, on Jones’s own analysis, boil down to something like “Scott is the denotation of that meaning.” But now you have just replaced one description (“the author of Waverley”) with another (“the denotation of the meaning of ‘the author of Waverley’”). You could then ask what that new phrase means, and you would be thrown into an endless loop. Russell claimed this showed that treating descriptions as meaningful in isolation gets you nowhere — you cannot explain the meaning of a description without falling into a regress.
Jones replied that the regress is harmless. All it does is repeat the same pattern over and over, and that doesn’t make the original analysis wrong. She also spotted a mistake in Russell’s own argument. In a famous passage from Principia Mathematica, Russell tried to prove that “the author of Waverley” must mean nothing. Jones noticed that Russell was sliding between two different senses of “meaning” — intension and denotation. Once you keep those apart, the argument collapses. Many later philosophers have agreed that her reply was on the right track.
Why It Still Matters
The battle between Jones and Russell isn’t just dusty history. It lies behind something you do every day. When a friend tells you that the quiet kid in your art class is the same person as the author of your favorite comic, you learn something — even though the sentence just says that person A is person B. The reason is that the two descriptions offer different routes to the same individual, and linking them gives you a new piece of the world.
Jones was one of the first philosophers to put this insight at the center of logic. She showed that language can be both rigorous and surprising, because words carry different ways of thinking even when they point to the same thing. The debate she started with Russell still echoes: how do names hook onto objects? Do ordinary proper names have an intension, or are they just empty tags? The answers aren’t settled, and that’s exactly why philosophy keeps asking.
Think about it
- If you discover that the person who wrote your favorite song is actually your next-door neighbor, why does that feel so different from just learning that your neighbor is your neighbor?
- Can you think of two completely different descriptions that both lead to the same place — maybe your school or your local park?
- Jones believed that proper names like “Taylor Swift” carry an intension — a way of thinking about the person. Do you think a name has a meaning beyond just pointing to someone? Why or why not?
