This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Take the sentence the present King of France is bald. It has the grammatical form of every other sentence that predicates a property of a named subject, the present King of France is bald reads exactly like the King of England is tall, but there is no present King of France for the sentence to be about, France having been a republic since 1870. Is the sentence true, false, or neither. Bertrand Russell's 1905 paper On Denoting proposed that the grammatical form of the sentence was misleading philosophers about its real logical structure, and that logical analysis could dissolve the puzzle by translating the sentence into a form that makes its actual claims explicit. Analyzed correctly, Russell argued, the present King of France is bald really asserts three separate things at once, that there exists an entity that is presently King of France, that at most one such entity exists, and that entity is bald. Since the first of those three claims is simply false, no such entity exists, the whole conjunction is false, and the puzzle dissolves: the sentence is straightforwardly false, not meaningless and not some strange third truth value, because grammatical subject and logical subject turn out not to be the same thing. This was more than a clever fix for one troublesome sentence. It was a demonstration, in miniature, of what Russell and Frege before him meant by logical analysis, that ordinary language routinely disguises the real logical structure of a claim, the way a definite description like the present King of France looks like a naming expression but functions logically like a disguised existence claim, and that formal logic, not grammar, is the tool for exposing what a sentence actually says. Frank Ramsey later called the theory of descriptions a paradigm of philosophy, and the label stuck because the method generalized: analytic philosophy's recurring wager, from Russell through the logical positivists to ordinary language philosophy and beyond, is that many of philosophy's hardest puzzles are puzzles about the surface grammar of the sentences used to state them, and that formal analysis can dissolve a confusion no amount of further argument in ordinary language would ever resolve.