 The decision whether to grant a metalinguistic meaning to names appears to come down to what is basic and what is generated in the semantic theory. If the meaning of a name is generated from the metalinguistic meaning of the constituent proper nominal, then names will accordingly have a metalinguistic meaning (most likely in the form of a rule of use). If instead names are treated as basic by the semantics, then there is less motivation to assign them such a meaning (we shouldn’t simply do so by default, as already discussed in  Section 2.5).