What are the conditions for fixing the reference of a proper name? Debate on this point has recently been rekindled by Scott Soames, Robin Jeshion, and others. In this paper, I sketch a new pragmatic approach to the justification of reference-fixing procedures, in opposition to accounts that insist on an invariant set of conditions for fixing reference across environments and linguistic communities. Comparing reference to other relations whose instances are introduced through “initiation” procedures, I outline a picture in which the procedures that are successful for fixing the reference of proper names depend in part on regularities in the actual environment. From the beginnings of direct reference theory, there has been controversy about its implications for how proper names can be introduced. Kaplan had argued in “Quantifying In ” that referring to an entity requires that a speaker be “en rapport ” with that entity, which includes a requirement that causal contact have been made with it (1969, p. 232), while Plantinga, in “De
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