Indeterminacy and reference: comments on Roads to Reference

Roads to Reference: An Essay on Reference Fixing in Natural Language by Mario Gomez-Torrente provides an ample attack against certain more recent variants of descriptivism in the theory of reference. The book discusses a wide variety of expressions, but the focus of this short note is on proper names and natural kind terms. In the case of proper names, indeterminacy plays an important role in Gomez-Torrente's critical argument. Some questions related to it are raised. As to natural kind terms, the differences between ordinary kind terms and (proto-) scientific kind terms are discussed, and the somewhat ignored relevance of reference borrowing for natural kind terms is emphasized.