Ontology, modality, and the fallacy of reference

This book offers a new theory of proper names and a new view of the nature of necessity. It features analyses of the concept of a physical thing and the relation between the names of things and the things they name. It questions the prevalent view that names "refer to" or "denote" the things they name. Instead, it presents a theory of proper names, according to which names express certain special properties that the things they name exhibit. This theory leads to some important conclusions about whether things have any of their properties as a matter of necessity. This will be an important book for philosophers in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, though it will also interest linguists concerned with the semantics of natural language.