ABSTRACT
Because names typically occur in bare, unmodified, singular form, philosophical debates about the semantics of names have traditionally focused exclusively on examples such as these, and have traditionally seen their goal as that of providing an adequate account of names understood as singular terms; and given Kripke’s arguments against the descriptive theories of names offered initially by Russell and elaborated by Quine, Referentialism, the view that a name is a directly referential expression, has come to dominate the philosophical literature. Given the linguistic data, which shows that in surface grammar names function sometimes as singular terms and sometimes as general terms, an adequate theory of the semantics of names must do at least three things. Cats would have been cats even if the word ‘cat’ had never been used; but Sophies would not have been Sophies unless the word ‘Sophie’ had been used as a name.
