Russell and Strawson, indexical and improper descriptions zyx by ROD BERTOLET (Purdue University) IN 1957 RUSSELL published a reply to Strawson’s criticism of his theory of descriptions which is largely ignored-because, perhaps, many readers took the less charitable option when Russell left them to decide whether his inability to see any validity in Strawson’s objections was due to senility. While parts of Russell’s reply are opaque, and others irrelevant, there is one line of argument in it which seems to me exactly on the right track, exposing a key difficulty in Strawson’s argument against Russell. The main purpose of this paper is to set out and defend this aspect of Russell’s reply, thus partially vindicating “Mr. Strawson on referring”. Why the vindication is only partial will emerge in the closing portions of the paper. Much has been written on this topic, of course-but I think Russell’s point is sufficiently important for current disputes that it is worth a few pages to rescue it from its present obscurity. Perhaps I should make it clear at the outset that, just as I am not defending every aspect of Russell’s reply to Strawson, I make no pretense to adjudicate all of the issues that divide the two of them. The issue of truth value gaps, and what some see as Russell’s unfortunate commitment to an object theory of meaning, will be left to the side. What I do want to claim is that there is a way of construing Russell’s aims, and his theory of descriptions, on which Strawson’s criticisms are ineffectual. Whether this captures all of Russell’s aims is a question I should be happy to leave to scholars. For the purposes of this paper, I shall construe Russell’s theory as claiming that a sentence of the form ‘The 0 is zyx Y7 is true if and only The author wishes to thank the referee for his very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.