 On the other hand, the metalinguistic property attributed to the proper nominal appears superfluous in accounting for the way a name identifies its referent to the audience. The fact that the referent of the speaker’s use of “Alice” is called “Alice” is something that can reasonably be inferred from the form of the referring expression alone, and doesn’t require access to its meaning. It is a familiar point that we should think twice before attributing to meaning an inference that requires nothing more than common sense (Grice 1975). Indeed, it is not clear that such an interpretation could belong to a conventional meaning, since a convention requires a possible alternative, and there is no alternative to taking an utterance of “Alice” to narrow the field to those individuals who are called “Alice”.