 So how does it happen that the stipulative effort attaches your name to you and not competitors? According to a Lockean line of thinking, the indispensability of criteria becomes clear when we consider that question; stipulation is no substitute for criteria. Unless speakers have essential criteria in mind to demarcate the real referent—you, in this instance—from alternative candidates like your body, the speaker would stipulate a rigid designator in vain: his names would turn out, disappointingly, to be “the Signs of he knows not what, which is in Truth to be the Signs of nothing” (Locke, Essay III.ii.2, p. 406). On this line of thinking, a stipulation leaves too much indeterminacy to secure the right rigidity. To insist that the right designatum is secured without criteria seems, according to this line of thinking, to insist on stipulation getting it right by magic. 