Reference-determination addresses the fundamental question: what makes a word or expression pick out a particular object or set of objects in the world? Theories include descriptive content, causal history, use conventions, and speaker intentions. No single mechanism explains all cases—some terms may be referentially fixed by description, others by causal chains, others by social convention.
From your prerequisite work on meaning and reference basics, you know the Fregean starting point: there's a difference between sense (the mode of presentation, *how* you think about something) and reference (the object itself, *what* is picked out). The morning star and the evening star have different senses but the same reference — Venus. But this raises a deeper question: what makes it the case that any expression refers to anything at all? What's the mechanism by which the word "gold" hooks onto actual gold in the world, rather than something else?
The classical answer, the description theory, says a name or term refers to whatever uniquely satisfies the descriptions associated with it. "Aristotle" refers to the person who was the teacher of Alexander, the student of Plato, the author of the *Nicomachean Ethics*, and so on. The reference is fixed by the descriptive content speakers associate with the name. This view has intuitive appeal — it explains how we can think about absent and non-existent objects using descriptive content. But it runs into severe problems. Kripke's modal argument: if "Aristotle" meant "the teacher of Alexander," then it would be *necessarily* true that Aristotle taught Alexander, since that's what "Aristotle" picks out. But it seems clearly *contingent* — Aristotle might never have met Alexander. The description theory conflates the reference-fixing description with the meaning, generating false necessities.
Kripke's alternative is the causal-historical theory: names refer because of a causal chain linking present use back to an original dubbing or naming event. "Aristotle" refers to Aristotle because someone introduced that name while pointing to (or talking directly about) the man, and subsequent uses of the name inherited their reference through a chain of communication back to that original event. This explains why reference is stable even when speakers associate wrong descriptions with a name. Most people associate "Gödel" with "the man who proved the incompleteness theorems" — but if it turned out a man named Schmidt actually proved those theorems and Gödel stole the proof, we'd say our uses of "Gödel" still referred to the man called Gödel, not to Schmidt. Reference tracks causal origin, not descriptive fit.
Natural kind terms like "water" and "gold" introduce a third variation: semantic externalism. Putnam argued that "water" refers to H₂O even when speakers didn't know water's chemical structure, because what the term picks out is determined by the real nature of the stuff, not by speakers' internal descriptions. Reference is partly determined by the *environment* — by what is actually there — not just by what's in the speaker's head. Together these theories show that reference-determination is a heterogeneous phenomenon: different mechanisms may operate for proper names, natural kind terms, and ordinary descriptions, which is why this course builds toward Kripke, Putnam, and Davidson as three distinct frameworks, not one unified theory.
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