 Now the meaning-in-isolation theorist might suggest that our original sentence, ‘Scott is the author of Waverley’, means that Scott is the denotation of M*. But, as Russell observes, all this does is to replace one description with another. Since the theorist fails to tell us what ‘the author of Waverley’ means in terms that don’t involve an expression equally in need of analysis, we have been given no evidence that this, or any, description is meaningful in isolation.