 In response to the modal argument, the descriptivist might avail herself of individual essence descriptions like ‘the person identical to Bill Gates’, ‘the person that Bill-Gatizes’, or rigidifications of the above descriptions, ‘the person actually named ‘Bill Gates’’ and ‘the person that actually stands at the origin of this chain of uses of the name ‘Bill Gates’’, all of which designate the same person in every possible world in which they designate anything. It is plausible that semantic competence suffices for recognition of the truth of the sentence ‘Bill Gates is the person identical to Bill Gates’ and that that sentence expresses a necessary truth. So these versions of descriptivism seem to escape the problems discussed in the previous paragraphs. The first two candidates, however, do not hold much promise for solving the problem of apparently true singular negative existentials. We know what the property of being identical to Bill Gates is, but only because we know the result of plugging up one of the relata in the two-place relation is identical to with the individual Bill Gates. Insofar as we think that reality does not include any entity identical to Ronald McDonald, however, we are then left to wonder what the property of being identical to Ronald McDonald is. Because the contents of these properties are derivative from the individuals that serve as the referents of their names, they are poor candidate descriptive equivalences for a robust version of descriptivism and unlikely to shed light on the truth of seemingly singular negative existentials like ‘Ronald McDonald does not exist’. Similar considerations apply to the predicating view. 