The phrase "indefinite description" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in discussions about linguistics, philosophy, or logic when referring to a type of noun phrase that does not specify a particular referent.
Example: "In his analysis, he focused on the role of indefinite descriptions in conveying meaning without identifying specific entities."
Alternatives: "indefinite noun phrase" or "non-specific description".
Such a vague and indefinite description of a material ingredient of the offence is not a compliance with the rules of pleading in framing an indictment.
Professor Gross's September 2015 assertion that "Poles killed more Jews than [they did] Germans" is what philosophers since Russell would call an indefinite description, impossible to count as true or false until the terms are settled.
We want to know precisely why a pronoun looks like a definite description here, but an indefinite description there.
This operator is an indefinite description operator that was introduced by Hilbert to designate some object x that satisfies an open formula φ.
By a "description" Russell means any phrase of the form "a so-and-so" (an "ambiguous" or "indefinite" description) or "the so-and-so" (a "definite" description), though he focuses on the latter in his discussion of knowledge by description.
Kripke gives the example of the name 'Feynman' to which the members of a certain group attach the indefinite description 'a physicist', which is insufficient, due to the popularity of the profession, to single anyone out, let alone Feynman himself.
On one hand, it is the sum total of all the associated beliefs about it (the definite and indefinite descriptions associated with the name).
Very few natural languages have what we would recognize as definite and indefinite descriptions.
Sentences are now construed like indefinite descriptions in that they, too, serve to introduce discourse referents.
That is to say, there are referential and quantificational uses of indefinite descriptions and these are a reflex of a genuine semantical ambiguity.
The discussion of definite and indefinite descriptions (phrases of the form 'the F' and 'an F') has been at the center of analytic philosophy for over a century now.
