What are the proposed solutions?
Informative Identities
Russell solves this issue by treating ‘Scott is Scott’ and ‘the author of Waverley is Scott’ as two distinct logical statements. The first is simply a matter of identity, and can be deduced by intuition alone. However, the phrase ‘the author of Waverley is Scott’ should instead be considered a question regarding who the actual author of Waverley was. Russell can therefore account for why the phrase would remain significant, even when the referent is not known; it can be considered an assertion which depicts an attribute of being an author of Waverley (which in this case is being Scott). How Russell would interpret the second statement would be: ‘There is at least one author of Waverley’,
Informative Identities
Russell solves this issue by treating ‘Scott is Scott’ and ‘the author of Waverley is Scott’ as two distinct logical statements. The first is simply a matter of identity, and can be deduced by intuition alone. However, the phrase ‘the author of Waverley is Scott’ should instead be considered a question regarding who the actual author of Waverley was. Russell can therefore account for why the phrase would remain significant, even when the referent is not known; it can be considered an assertion which depicts an attribute of being an author of Waverley (which in this case is being Scott). How Russell would interpret the second statement would be: ‘There is at least one author of Waverley’,