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1. For more on the reference of mental states, see the entries onmental representation,causal theories of mental content,externalism about mental content, andteleological theories of mental content. For more on the reference of pictures, see the entry onGoodman’s aesthetics.

2. Searle (1983) claims that to construe reference-determining contentas in all cases specifiable linguistically, is to misconstrue thenature of such content. Some such content may (for instance) beperceptually based, but not linguistically specifiable. See also Frege(1892).

3. For criticisms, see Soames (2002). And for a defense, see Nelson(2002). See also the entry onrigid designators.

4. For a formal proof of the necessity of identity in quantified modallogic, see Marcus (1947).

5. See Evans (1973, 1982) for a number of additional cases which haveproven vexatious for the committed causal theorist. Evans alsosketches an important variation on the causal theory, one whichfocuses on the cause of the plurality of the speaker’s beliefs,rather than on their acquisition of the name itself. For furtherdevelopments of this general line of thought, see Dickie (2015). For adefense of the causal theory in light of Evans’ cases, seeMichaelson (2023).

6. For arguments that this consequence is less counterintuitive than wemight initially be inclined to take it to be, see Michaelson(forthcoming).

7. See Rami (2014) for helpful discussion on these issues and analternative formulation of the indexical view designed to deal withmany of them. There are also some prominent ways of trying to dealwith cases like these but which have it that names aren’tthemselves referential. Rather, they denote properties. On such‘predicativist’ views of names, as developed by Burge(1973) and Graff Fara (2015), singular reference only emerges once adeterminer like ‘that’ or ‘the’ is appended tothe name. In languages like English, these determiners are silent or‘covert’. For more, see the entry onnames.

8. A significant literature has sprouted up regarding this claim,centered on what has been called ‘the answering machineparadox’. See Cohen and Michaelson (2013) and the entry onindexicals for further discussion and references.

9. See, however, Gray (2014, 2015) and Jeshion (2015) for complicationsregarding this notion of name-bearing.

10. The terminology was introduced to the philosophy of language inMacKay (1968). The allusion is to some of Humpty Dumpty’smemorable comments in Lewis Carroll’sThrough the LookingGlass regarding the degree of control he takes himself to exhibitover the meanings of the words that he utters. For an argument to theeffect that Humpty Dumpty-ism is, in fact, defensible fordemonstratives like ‘this’ and ‘that’, seeRadulescu (2019).

11. Such agreement is not universal, however. King (2013), for instance,claims that (10) is false due to reference failure, whereas Radulescu(2019) contends that it is, in fact, true and Nowak (2020) challengesthe presumption that there need be an answer to this question.

12. This sort of view has also been fleshed-out and defended by, amongothers, Schiffer (1981) and Bach (1992). For some more recentvariations on the Gricean approach, see Unnsteinsson (2022) and Keiser(2023).

13. See King (2013) for a similar suggestion. King considers thereference of demonstratives to be ‘semantic’ whereas Bachcharacterizes it as ‘pragmatic’, but from our presentperspective this looks like a terminological dispute. Both agree onhow to explain our judgments regarding reference and truth when itcomes to utterances of sentences containing demonstratives. We willreturn to this distinction in section 4. For discussion and criticismof this kind of view, see Speaks (2016, 2017), Radulescu (2019),Michaelson (2022), and Unnsteinsson (2022).

14. A different sort of constraint on demonstrative reference has beendeveloped in Neale (2004), Stokke (2010), and King (2014). Prescindingfrom various differences between these accounts, each of holds thatreferential success requires the referent either be recoverable oractually recovered by the listener (or an idealized version thereof).For arguments against this range of views, see Nowak and Michaelson(2021).

15. Another challenge that the Russellian looks set to avoid has to dowith descriptions that, intuitively, refer to nonexistent objects.Descriptions like ‘the sun god’ or ‘the protagonistofThe Broken Earth trilogy’ don’t seem to referto real objects, yet they are hardly meaningless. The Russellian caneasily accommodate this by making use of her translation procedure,whereas the referentialist will have to offer some additional storyregarding how these count as meaningful. Note that an analogousproblem, the problem of empty names, also arises for Millians. Formore on these issues, see the entry onnonexistent objects.

16. See Devitt (1997) and Reimer (1998) for an application of these ideasto the present context. For criticism, see Schoubye (2011).

17. See Abbott (2008) and the entry ondescriptions for further discussion.

18. See Devitt (2022) for an extension of the causal theory along theselines.

19. For more on these issues, see the entry onthe problem of the many.

20. Granted, if Heck really is denying that there is any such thing aslinguistic reference, then following them in that would obviate theneed to address the problem of the many for linguistic reference.Still, Heck clearly thinks that there are important explanatory rolesfor the speaker and listener’s respective construals ofreferential terms. And each of those construals will face a version ofthis problem.