Causal theories of names became popular during the 1970s, under the influence of work by Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan.
Kripke and Hilary Putnam also defended an analogous causal account of natural kind terms.
Kripke argued that in order to use a name successfully to refer to something, you do not have to be acquainted with a uniquely identifying description of that thing.
Such a causal process might proceed as follows: the parents of a newborn baby name it, pointing to the child and saying "we'll call her 'Jane'."
Philosophers such as Gareth Evans have insisted that the theory's account of the dubbing process needs to be broadened to include what are called 'multiple groundings'.
Under certain circumstances of confusion, this can lead to the alteration of a name's referent (for one example of how this might happen, see Twin Earth thought experiment).
Russell found that certain logical contradictions could be avoided if names were considered disguised definite descriptions (a similar view is often attributed to Gottlob Frege, mostly on the strength of a footnoted comment in "On Sense and Reference", although many Frege scholars consider this attribution misguided).
Putnam, for instance, attempted to establish that 'water' refers rigidly to the stuff that we do in fact call 'water', to the exclusion of any possible identical water-like substance for which we have no causal connection.
A speaker whose environment changes may thus observe that the referents of his terms shift, as described in the Twin Earth and Swampman thought experiments.
[citation needed] Mark Sainsbury argued[8] for a causal theory similar to Kripke's, except that the baptised object is eliminated.