Bertrand Russell on Definite Descriptions

It's tempting to make fun of Bertrand Russell. First of all, it is well-known that is Principia-Mathematica had intractable errors, several of which were pointed out by Wittgenstein, a student of Russell's who by mutual consensus quickly passed the mentor up. Even though Russell's work was in part based on ideas developed by Gottlob Frege, the Principia, which he wrote with A.N. Whitehead, was nonetheless a highly original development as a project to eliminate the ambiguities of language by reducing language to an unambiguous artificial language.

Indeed, Russell's Principia was influential, but to reiterate, not savable. Also part of Russell's legacy is his widely read History of Western Philosophy; however, this book should be read with a suspicious eye. There are, as most who have read it realize, a variety of factual errors and conjectures, and in some cases, obvious bias (Russell left Wittgenstein out of the history, most likely as a personal snub). Fortunately for Russell, he has left us with a few gems that haven' t yet been blemished. One is his initial 'Gettier' case in epistemology, which wasn't given due credit until Edmund Gettier proffered similar examples in the journal Synthese in 1963. Another helpful and useful contribution Russell has made to the literature is his theory of definite descriptions. This theory constitutes an achievement made in the philosophy of language. Frege and Russell were worried about what to make of the following sort of statement:

The present king of France is bald.

Is this sentence true or false? Given that there is no present king of France, it is not true. However, it is not clear that it is false, either. This is because this sentence fails to represent the world in a different sort of way than it would if it were false by virtue of the fact that there were a present king of France who was bald. On Frege's account, if the sentence were not true or false, then it must be meaningless. But wait, this sentence is not meaningless-we can make perfect sense of it. How then are we to evaluate such a claim?