The common-sense view was originally formulated by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1843), where he defines it as "a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about but not of telling anything about it".
[1] This view was criticized when philosophers applied principles of formal logic to linguistic propositions.
One may intuitively assume that the name refers to a person who may or may not be Roman, and that the truth value depends on whether or not that is the case.
But from the point of view of a theory of meaning the question is how the word Cicero establishes its referent.
Many theories have been proposed about proper names, each attempting to solve the problems of reference and identity inherent in the concept.
This leads Burge to argue that plural usages of names, such as "all the Alfreds I know have red hair", support this view.
The habitual acquaintance with it having been acquired, it becomes a Symbol whose Interpretant represents it as an Icon of an Index of the Individual named."
[7] In his later work, however, he has been attributed a cluster-descriptivist position based on the idea of family resemblances (for example by Kripke), although it has been argued that this misconstrues Wittgenstein's argument.
In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida specifically refutes the idea that proper names stand outside of the social construct of language as a binary relation between referent and sign.
Rather, he argues the proper name as all words are caught up in a context of social, spatial, and temporal differences that make it meaningful.