According to the usual, simplified picture of the Meinong‑Russell controversy, Meinong’s semantics is structurally amazingly simple but ontologically very expensive, while Russell’s theory contains some counter‑intuitive syntactic complica-tions, but to make up for this expense it releases us from almost all ontological troubles. Now the reality is much more complex. On the one hand it appears that the alleged ontological innocence of Russell’s solution has been highly exaggerated. In particular it assumes a Platonic ontology of universal properties. At the same time, if we look a bit closer, also Meinong’s theory turns out to be much more complicated than it looks at the first sight. It involves a hierarchy of objects exhibiting different degrees of completeness and in the later period of Meinong’s thought the structure of intentional reference takes a form very similar to that which has been proposed by Russell in his On Denoting.

In the paper I present the famous argument between Peter F. Strawson and Bertrand Russell on definite descriptions. I do not go into details of the two rival solutions to the problem of definite descriptions. Instead I present the controversy against the background of two traditions within analytic philosophy, i.e. the philosophy of natural language (Strawson) and the philosophy of ideal language (Russell). In consequence, the aim of this paper is to sketch the principal features of the two traditions and to indicate their influence on the argument. In the first paragraph I discuss Russell’s theory of descriptions and present it as a result of dramatic changes that he had made in his philosophy before he finally presented them in On Denoting in 1905. The second paragraph deals with the two traditions within analytic philosophy after the linguistic turn and underlines the role of Strawson in the philosophy of natural language. In the third paragraph I analyze in detail Strawson’s arguments against the theory of descriptions and I focus on some details that are usually omitted in standard presentations. The fourth paragraph discusses Russell’s response to Strawson’s objections, i.e. the counter-arguments formulated from the standpoint of philosophy of ideal language. I end with some suggestions about how to reconcile both approaches.

The aim of the paper is to present the theory of meaning formulated by Roman Ingarden in the Controversy over the Existence of the World, The Literary Work of Art, and in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. When this has been done here, I test Ingarden’s theory by applying it to selected problems of contemporary philosophy of language. These problems include the semantics of empty names, the controversy between Millianism and descriptivism over the nature of proper names, the problem of substitutability in intensional contexts, meaning holism, compositionality, and the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. My analysis of these problems within the framework of Ingarden’s theory and my presentation of their solutions as delivered by G. Frege, K. Ajdukiewicz, W.V. Quine and D. Davidson shed interesting light on this extremely complex and ‘fine‑grained’ theory based on Ingarden’s original ontology. Although Ingarden’s theory does not fall within the dominant current of language philosophy, it offers a solution to the problem of empty names, the relation of proper names to definite descriptions, and substitutability. The theory is not holistic nor does it blur the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Unfortunately, Ingarden’s theory is not compositional and reifies meanings, which may be seen as a serious objection to it. Therefore, the assessment of this theory cannot be unequivocal.