Intuitions and reference of proper names

Experimental philosophy brought out an intense debate on the methodology of philosophical theories of reference. The debate started with the assumption that Kripke’s refutation of classical descriptivism for proper names relies on the method of cases and the evidential role of referential intuitions in Gödel/Schmidt-like cases. Some scholars have rejected such assumption. They claim that referential intuitions have no evidential role in Kripke’s refutation of classical descriptivism and in philosophical theories of reference in general. Thereby they dismiss the findings of empirical surveys on laypeople’s referential intuitions and truth-value judgments as irrelevant to philosophical theories of reference. We side with those scholars. However, we discuss a largely unnoticed aspect of the findings of empirical surveys on laypeople’s referential intuitions and truth-value judgments, which cannot be ignored, not even by the scholars who dismiss the evidential role of referential intuitions and the centrality of the method of cases in philosophical theories of reference. We explain that if those findings were reliable, they would raise a real threat to Kripke’s refutation of classical descriptivism for proper names. We provide evidence that those findings are not reliable.