 It’s worth noting some clear divisions among these options. First, there is a divide between views according to which referential terms themselves refer, and that we thus use them to refer because they already do so, and views according to which it is us who do the referring, with token linguistic reference following only derivatively. The causal theory and certain non-classical versions of descriptivism are paradigm instances of the former sort of view, whereas the intentionalist model is a paradigm instance of the  latter—along with the classical descriptivism of Frege and Russell. Due to its inherent flexibility, the character model is harder to place along this spectrum. Kaplan’s rules for the true indexicals seem to straddle this divide: indexical tokens acquire their reference because they are uttered in a particular context, presumably intentionally. But they acquire their reference independently of anything having to do with the speaker’s mental state. If we extend the character theory to include both intention-dependent characters for demonstratives and constant, context-invariant characters for names, then things become more complicated still. In that case, the character theory starts to look pluralistic with respect to this division; some referential terms acquire their reference in virtue of our using them to refer, whereas we use other such terms to refer in virtue of their antecedently referring.