 Strawson published ‘On Referring’ in 1950. (Like Frege, Russell and, later, Kripke and Evans, Strawson made his name by writing about reference.) He subsequently modified and developed his views on reference, but the central claim of ‘On Referring’ is something he always defended. Strawson’s title contains, of course, an allusion to Russell’s famous article ‘On Denoting’, the central idea of which Strawson is criticising. Strawson’s conception of the debate is that Russell offered his theory of descriptions as a complete account of the role of definite descriptions in English (such expressions as ‘the queen of England’), whereas the truth is that the role of the word ‘the’ when embedded in definite descriptions cannot be captured in a single account. There are uses which do not fit Russell’s theory because the phenomenon is simply more complex than Russell allowed. It is not, therefore, that Strawson is offering his own complete theory; it is, rather, that he is picking out uses for which, according to him, Russell’s theory fails, and characterising them. Russell’s theory had achieved the status of orthodoxy at the time that Strawson launched his attack on it. That this is the way to understand Strawson’s contribution to the debate has the important consequence that it is no objection to his approach to point to uses of ‘the’ about which, arguably, Russell (or something close to Russell’s view) might be correct. Such points do not touch Strawson’s central claim. This undermines a number of responses to Strawson. Strawson’s paper initiated a debate about definite descriptions that has run ever since its publication, and in which his views have remained central.