Most of us wouldn’t think there was anything problematic about the meaning of names. When I use the name ‘Brad’ to talk about my good friend, we wouldn’t think to question what I actually meant by the name ‘Brad’. After all, I just mean Brad – that guy who pops up on MSN chat to distract me from my studies. But it turns out that a workable semantics of names is one of the most elusive goals of the philosophy of language today. In a very real sense, we still don’t know what names mean. There is still no agreement on how it is that we manage to use names as we do, or even how it is that we can refer to objects at all. At this point, your commonsense ideas are probably causing you to scoff. Of course we know what names mean – they mean whatever object they stand for! And maybe they do. By the end of this article, you might still think as you did at the beginning – but I doubt you’ll remain so confident.