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The discovery of the twin categories of reference and singular thought is widely felt to be one of the landmark achievements of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. On the one hand there is the distinction between bona fide referential expressions of natural language and those that are about objects only in some looser sense. On the other hand there is a corresponding distinction between a thought that is loosely about an object, and one whose bond with an object is robust enough for it to count as genuinely ‘singular’ or ‘de re’. This chapter tries to shed light on these two ideas by focusing on semantic ideas connected with Russell’s category of logically proper names that have been widely brought to bear on their successors.

Knowing what an expression means is neither knowing that it means such and such nor knowing how to do things with the expression; it is being in, or being apt to be in, a certain kind of language-processing state. The account of knowledge of meaning is seen to suggest that, strictly speaking, there are no such things as expression meanings. Whether or not that is so, there are things to which an expression must be related if it is to have meaning, and with an eye to David Kaplan’s characters, these things are called characters*. This leads to a critical discussion of two-dimensional semantics.

A critical discussion of David Lewis’s two-dimensional framework for doing semantics. Lewis’s framework has the same abstract structure as David Kaplan’s semantics for demonstratives, where the truth-value of a sentence is defined as a function of two parameters, one of which is a context. This chapter focuses on the notion of context that is common to the two frameworks, arguing that it is not suited to play the pragmatic role that we need a notion of context to play. The technical notion that both Kaplan and Lewis call ‘context’ plays several different roles in the explanation of speech that need to be distinguished, and this notion also needs to be distinguished from a pragmatic notion of context as the body of information that is available for the determination of what is said.

Existing metasemantic projects presuppose that word- (or sentence-) types are part of the non-semantic base. This paper proposes a new strategy: an endogenous account of word types, that is, one where word types are fixed as part of the metasemantics. On this view, it is the conventions of truthfulness and trust that ground not only the meaning of the words (meaning by convention) but also what the word type is of each particular token utterance (words by convention). The same treatment extends to identifying the populations through which the conventions prevail. The paper considers whether this proposal leads to new underdetermination challenges for metasemantics, and makes a case that it does not.