Evans became close friends with philosopher Derek Parfit and other prominent members of his academic field such as Christopher Peacocke and Crispin Wright.

[2][3] His collected papers (1985) and his major work, The Varieties of Reference (1982), edited by John McDowell, were published posthumously.

"[4] In the acknowledgements of his Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit writes "I owe much to the intensity of his love of truth, and his extraordinary vitality.

[6] His research, according to Rick Grush, "aimed at understanding semantics, and he produced seminal work on proper names, pronouns, indexicals, demonstratives, and vagueness.

"[7] Evans was one of many in the UK who took up the project of developing formal semantics for natural languages, initiated by Donald Davidson in the 1960s and 1970s.

Its central chapters have, according to Martin Davies, had "a profound influence on subsequent work in philosophy of psychology, particularly concerning the perception and representation of space, and more generally the conditions for an objective conception of a spatial world.

Evans concedes that names do not in general have descriptive meanings (although he contends that they could, in some cases), but argues that the proponents of the new theory had much too simplistic a view.

He then claims that a certain version of the new theory, which he calls the photograph model of mental representation (1982, p. 78), violates Russell's principle.

Furthermore, he would charge philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (in his Blue and Brown Books [1958]) and Elizabeth Anscombe (in her "The First Person" [1975]) for having wrongly concluded that such cases show that the first-person pronoun "I" does not refer to anything.

In the last third of the book Evans turns to problems with reference to objects that actively depend on the use of language.

Here he treats the use of proper names, which do not seem to presuppose as much knowledge on the part of the speaker as demonstrative or recognition-based identification.