Testing name swapping: Is Beyoncé really famous?

Abstract All the experimental work on the reference of proper names during the last 20 years has utilised setups modelled after Kripke’s Gödel and Jonah cases. Doubts remain, however, about the viability of the setup. This paper reports the results from a new experiment, using a different and novel kind of setup. The novel setup is simultaneously used on proper names, artefact terms, and definitional terms, with the last two categories serving as controls. Our vignettes describe cases of potential reference swaps, where two referring expressions begin, due to a mix-up, to be used with the intention of referring to each others’ original referents. In otherwise analogous cases, it was found that a majority of Western subjects understand proper names to continue to refer to their original referents, whereas this was not the case for the two other classes of expression. The results indicate, first, that this experimental setup, unlike earlier ones, succeeds in distinguishing between different mechanisms of reference determination, and second, that proper names indeed do refer differently from the other classes of expression that were used.