ABSTRACT
The causal theory of reference arose from Saul Kripke’s attack in Naming and Necessity on descriptivist analyses of proper names. His target was the view that, like most meaningful expressions, proper names express concepts that determine their extensions. In the case of names, these were thought to be individual concepts the unique instantiators of which were their referents. Kripke distinguished two versions of descriptivism—one purporting to give the meaning and referent of a proper name for a speaker and one purporting only to do the latter. Unlike strong descriptivism, the purportedly reference-fixing descriptions associated with names by weak descriptivism need not also determine their meanings. Hence, it is not defeated by the fact that substituting them for names may change the modal or epistemic profile of a sentence. After criticizing strong and weak descriptivism, Kripke offered common sense platitudes pointing toward a positive theory of reference-fixing.
