The aim of the paper is to present the theory of meaning formulated by Roman Ingarden in the Controversy over the Existence of the World, The Literary Work of Art, and in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. When this has been done here, I test Ingarden’s theory by applying it to selected problems of contemporary philosophy of language. These problems include the semantics of empty names, the controversy between Millianism and descriptivism over the nature of proper names, the problem of substitutability in intensional contexts, meaning holism, compositionality, and the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. My analysis of these problems within the framework of Ingarden’s theory and my presentation of their solutions as delivered by G. Frege, K. Ajdukiewicz, W.V. Quine and D. Davidson shed interesting light on this extremely complex and ‘fine‑grained’ theory based on Ingarden’s original ontology. Although Ingarden’s theory does not fall within the dominant current of language philosophy, it offers a solution to the problem of empty names, the relation of proper names to definite descriptions, and substitutability. The theory is not holistic nor does it blur the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Unfortunately, Ingarden’s theory is not compositional and reifies meanings, which may be seen as a serious objection to it. Therefore, the assessment of this theory cannot be unequivocal.

In his 1903 monograph Principles of Mathematics Bertrand Russell formulated a theory which interpreted a proposition expressed by a sentence as a unitary bond of referents (meanings) of its parts. In the paper I argue that the problem he faced in his attempt to define the unity of proposition is a special case of a wider philosophical problem of the relation between language and the world. Mentioned for the first time by Plato in Parmenides and then repeated by Aristotle in Metaphysics, infinite regress formulated as ʻthe third man argument’ presented a problem for Francis Bradley, Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. It was reformulated in syntactic terms by Hans Reichenbach and used by Donald Davidson as an argument against referential semantics. The conclusion of the paper is as follows: ʻthe third man argument’ is a result of projecting syntactic structures of language on metaphysically conceived referential semantics. It does not undermine ontology conceived as an investigation of possible beings.