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Massive Reduplication

Consider three possibilities

If your utterance of a word refers to a thing, then ...

1. you must be acquainted with that thing;

2. you must either be acquainted with it or else know it by description; or

3. you need neither acquintace nor knowledge by description.

Despite thinking we shouldn’t hold the strong line, I do think that there’s something fundamental about acquiantance ... and this is what really matters!
Why not hold the strong line? Because it avoids a claim about proper names for which there appears to be no justification ...

Russell’s idea:

Reference requires acquaintance knowledge of reference

Objection: in uttering ‘Julius Caesar drank the Rubicon’, I refered to Julius despite not being acquainted with him.

Reply: ‘Julius Caesar’ is actually a quantifier phrase (specifically, a description), so I did not refer.

Objection: rigid designators (Kripke)

Reply: descriptions can be rigidified

Objection: ...

...

Despite thinking we shouldn’t hold the strong line, I do think that there’s something fundamental about acquiantance ... and this is what really matters!

For all we know, a distant region of the universe may contain qualitatively indistinguisable duplicates of everything here.

Therefore: For all we know, even our most elaborate descriptions may fail to pick out individuals.

Therefore: When we rely on descriptions, we may fail to single out a unique object for all we know.

Therefore: If we relied only on descriptions, we may, for all we know, never single out a unique object.

But: We know that our utterances sometimes succeed in singling out a unique object.