 Against the background of traditional assumptions of how reality and the individuation of objects is to be conceived  (§1.3),  Chomsky’s conclusion is that natural language does not involve the reference relation, as a relation to “real” objects. The semantics of referential noun phrases rather involves lexical/conceptual structures deployed by speakers in particular contexts to refer to particular aspects of reality. Instead of a semantics with the (traditional) notion of external reference as its central notion, referential terms should have an internalist semantics, involving another level of syntactic representation, that of lexical-conceptual structure. This view will then require a different conception of compositionality than the standard one. Rather than being based on objects and properties, compositional semantics will have to do with concepts only or concepts together with mental instructions (Pietroski 2018).