FEW scholars achieve lasting fame as dramatically as did the philosopher Sir Peter Strawson. By 1950 Strawson, then a Fellow of University College, Oxford, was already a respected tutor and a promising member of the group of younger Oxford dons whose careful attention to the workings of natural languages marked them out as “linguistic” philosophers.

In July of that year, however, a mensis mirabilis, he published two extraordinary papers, which are still read and discussed more than 50 years later and which are prescribed to tyros as models of philosophical criticism.

The first of these concerned the topic of truth. During the late 1940s J. L. Austin, the leader of the linguistic philosophers, had been trying to construct what he envisaged as a “purified” version of the correspondence theory of truth — the theory that a statement’s truth consists in its correspondence to the extra-linguistic facts. At the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association held in July 1950, he unveiled his version of the theory.

Its formulation is complicated, not to say delphic, and it was Strawson’s achievement, in his immediate reply at the joint session, to show that insofar as Austin’s formula succeeded in saying anything that was not obviously false, it failed to constitute a rehabilitation of the correspondence theory.

This reply made a deep impression on those who heard it or read it. It subjected one of Austin’s own formulations to the kind of appraisal — penetrating, exact and merciless — which he liked to mete out to others but which few were acute enough to return.

The other paper that Strawson published in July 1950 resonated even more widely. Russell’s Theory of Descriptions had been praised by Ramsey as a “paradigm of philosophy”, and in the years since its appearance in 1905 it had come to be an accepted part of the philosophical logician’s tool-kit. The theory concerns the meaning of statements containing definite descriptions in the grammatical singular. According to it, a speaker who affirms “The King of France is bald” asserts that there is one and only one King of France, and that he is bald.

In On Referring Strawson attacked this account at its root. A speaker who affirms “The King of France is bald”, he maintained, does not assert that there is a unique King of France. Rather, he presupposes that there is; in choosing this form of words, he takes for granted that there is one and only one such person, and expects his audience to take this for granted too. Of course, he makes an assertion, but the content of that assertion can be understood only against the background of what is thus taken for granted. His assertion concerns the person presupposed to exist, and is to the effect that he is bald.

Accordingly, Strawson held, Russell was wrong to hold that the speaker’s statement is false in a context where there is no unique King of France. A statement is false only if things are not as it says them to be. But in the absence of a unique King of France, the statement lacks content, so that there is no such thing as the way it says things to be. In such a circumstance, the statement must be counted neither true nor false.

Philosophers continue to discuss whether this objection to Russell’s theory is the devastating blow that Strawson continued to believe it to be. The article’s enduring importance, however, does not depend upon the answer.

In the course of explaining his objection to Russell, Strawson was led to distinguish carefully between, for example, the declarative sentences of a language and the statements that people make by uttering those sentences.

Any satisfactory account of truth and of meaning must respect these distinctions, and his way of drawing them has survived the test of time to become canonical. His use of the notion of a presupposition, moreover, encouraged empirical linguists to investigate more generally the way in which different sorts of utterance carry presuppositions. Even where their theories supersede his work, they remain rooted in it.

Peter Frederick Strawson was born in London in 1919, the second of four children of a schoolmaster. He was educated at Christ’s College, Finchley, and in 1937 he went up to St John’s College, Oxford, with an open scholarship in English. Until the end of his life he had by heart large tracts of English verse and prose. Immediately on arriving at Oxford, however, he changed to read for the Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, in which he graduated with second-class honours three years later.

Even at the time this classification was widely recognised to have been a mistake. By the summer of 1940 many of the younger dons at Oxford had been, or were about to be, called up into the Armed Forces, so the task of examining was borne disproportionately by older figures less receptive to the glimmerings of a fresh approach to philosophical questions.