Saul Kripke's philosophy has had a great influence on the direction of analytic philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century. His published work on logic, modality, reference, truth and meaning is widely discussed today and the literature related to Kripke's ideas is vast (as a simple glance at the limited Bibliography in this book will attest). Among the views that Kripke has presented and developed is the view that the relation of reference between words and the world is not what had been thought for most of the twentieth century. The traditional view was that reference takes place via descriptions of some sort: the descriptivism discussed in Chapter 2. As we discussed in that chapter, Kripke argued that reference takes place via some sort of chain of reference dependent on uses of expressions. This view is what some philosophers, such as Gareth Evans (1973), have labelled the causal theory of names.

The phrase ‘causal theory of names’ is not Kripke's, although in at least one place in the lectures he does mention that reference is determined by a causal chain (NN: 139). In any case, although the phrase now has common currency in philosophy, it is best used with caution. The phrase suggests that there is a cause-and-effect relation that obtains between the name and its bearer. Unless reference itself is a causal relation, however, Kripke's suggested programme for a theory does not imply any particular causal relation between a name and its bearer.