 Kitcher takes causal theories of reference as his starting point to discuss conceptual change in the case of the gene concept (1982). He introduces the notion of reference potential of a term type, which on his account comprises several ways in which the reference of a token is fixed. On the one hand, there are several modes of reference and they are correlated with the intention of the speakers. Sometimes a speaker might value clarity and hence provide a description that fixes the reference of a term in the sense of descriptivist theories of reference. Indeed, researchers or teachers often provide definitions of the term “gene”. The description might turn out to be wrong, however, and hence the term might fail to refer, but at least the speaker made it transparent in which sense the term is used. In other situations, a speaker might want to conform to the established use of a term in a community. In this case the reference is fixed in the way suggested by causal theories of reference; in using the term the speaker relies on the existence of experts in the broader language community, who know how the term is applied correctly (i.e., how a member of the natural kind is identified). These experts are causally connected to the initial event of the term’s introduction. This is the way most people use the term “gene”. Finally, speakers might refer to an entity in a situation where they are in direct causal interaction with it. This might be the case when researchers refer to genes in research articles reporting experiments involving genes.