I haven't been posting in a while, being swamped with teaching duties and so on. Right now, I'm looking at M. Morris's An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language , which in those respects that currently interest me contains, I think, more material than, say, Miller's or Lycan's textbooks (having said that, these books on the other hand have other virtues). On pp 86ff Morris is talking about what he calls a simple nominal description theory, according to which a name n connotes the description `the object called n ' (or something to that effect). This, of course, seems to violate Kripke's non-circularity restriction; yet, it has been interestingly developed by K. Bach ( Thought and Reference ). Anyway, my point is rather short and historical - although this view hasn't been associated with anyone in the Frege-Russell period, this sort of approach has been around for a while, and I'm quite positive that at least Lesniewski hold that view. Her