ABSTRACT
In the course of Part III, I’ve incurred a couple of implicit promissory notes, some of which I’d like to discharge now. Although ultimately I’ll argue that the causal theorist cannot have what he craves – causality is not a relation that underwrites reference – still, as the concluding paragraphs of the previous section should have made clear, the causal idiom is a robust and important one which plays a significant role in reference, at least when the objects referred to are certain empirical ones. To make this claim plausible, it’s not enough merely to have fended off permutational threats. One must also say a little about how the causality relevant to reference operates, and how we gain access to it. This is, in large part, the topic of this section.
