 P3, however, is not free of non-trivial essentialist import. According to Salmon, deriving essentialism via the theory of reference is question-begging. Nonetheless, the fact that essentialist conclusions seem so plausible may be taken as evidence that there exist strong essentialist intuitions, and the arguments from Kripke and Putnam can be framed in non-semantic terms and thereby motivate essentialism directly—indeed many of Kripke’s arguments are not framed in semantic terms at all.