 On an alternative view (Devitt 1983), competence on ‘tiger’ does not consist in entertaining propositional beliefs such as “tigers are striped”, but rather in being appropriately linked to a network of causal chains for ‘tiger’ involving other people’s abilities, groundings, and reference borrowings. In order to understand the English word ‘tiger’ and use it in a competent fashion, a subject must be able to combine ‘tiger’ appropriately with other words to form sentences, to have thoughts which those sentences express, and to ground these thoughts in tigers. Devitt’s account appears to make some room for a speaker’s ability to, e.g., recognize a tiger when she sees one; however, the respective weights of individual abilities (and beliefs) and objective grounding are not clearly specified. Suppose a speaker A belongs to a community C that is familiar with tigers; unfortunately, A has no knowledge of the typical appearance of a tiger and is unable to tell a tiger from a leopard. Should A be regarded as a competent user ‘tiger’ on account of her being “part of C” and therefore linked to a network of causal chains for ‘tiger’?