 It has been widely held that essentialism, and natural kind essentialism in particular, is a consequence of the semantic arguments concerning reference put forward by Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975a). These arguments support semantic externalism, the view that the reference of a speaker’s term can depend on facts external to the speaker herself (e.g. facts concerning prior uses of the term). However, Salmon (1979, 1982) has argued persuasively that only trivial essentialism can be inferred from such arguments; stronger essentialist theses are derived only on the basis of unstated essentialist premises. For example, consider the following argument, reconstructed by Donnellan and discussed in Salmon (1982, 161–75):