PEIRCE TO STRAWSON elements to distinguish’ (PM 466) Analysis would reveal the complexity of concepts, and exhibit their constituent elements These constituents might be the subjects of further analysis, or they might be simple and unanalysable In Principia Ethica (1903) Moore famously claimed that good was such a simple, unanalysable property Russell, at the time of The Principles of Mathematics, believed that in order to save the objectivity of concepts and judgements it was necessary to accept the existence of propositions that subsisted independently of their expression in sentences Not only concepts, relations, and numbers had being, he believed, but also chimeras and the Homeric gods If they had no being, it would be impossible to make propositions about them ‘Thus being is a general attribute of everything, and to mention anything is to show that it is’ (PM 449) It was Russell’s seminal paper of 1905, ‘On Denoting’, that gave analysis a linguistic turn In that paper he showed how to make sense of sentences containing expressions like ‘the round square’ and ‘the present King of France’ without maintaining that these expressions denoted some entity, however shadowy, in the world The paper was for long regarded as a paradigm of analysis; but of course it contains no analysis of round squares or non-existent kings Instead, it shows how to rewrite such sentences, preserving their meaning, but removing the apparent attribution of being to the non-existent And Russell’s method is explicitly linguistic: it rests on making a distinction between those symbols (such as proper names) that denote something and the world, and other symbols which he called ‘incomplete symbols’, of which definite descriptions such as ‘the present King of France’ are one instance These symbols have no meaning on their own—they not denote anything—but the sentences in which they occur have a meaning, that is to say they express a proposition that is either true or false.5 Logical analysis, then, as practised in ‘On Denoting’ is a technique of substituting a logically clear form of words for another form of words which is in some way misleading But in Russell’s mind logical analysis was not only a linguistic device for the classification of sentences He came to believe that once logic had been cast into a perspicuous form it would reveal the structure of the world Russell’s theory of definite descriptions is presented in detail in Ch 52