ABSTRACT
From a naturalist’s point of view, a good account of reference will be empirical, and that means a part of cognitive science. A good theory will entail instances of purported reference-items on our initial list in Chapter 1, §2, of disquoted names-and will explain the linkage of word to object. None of the theories we have examined, from Frege onwards, comes close to explaining this phenomenon. They all abstract from language as characteristic of people and societies to a stark, two-way, word-to-thing relation.
