 Backward looking causal theories inspired by Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1975) might have initially seemed like candidates for an atomistic semantics. If what I meant by “cat” were determined by a causal chain leading back to the kind that prompted the first “that’s a cat” utterance, then one might think that the determinants of the meaning of each term could be distinct in the way that atomism requires. However, this initial attempt to restrict the determinants to a set of initial baptisms quickly ran aground on various counterexamples (such as the discussion of “Madagascar” (Evans 1973)), and the realization that some beliefs about sortals were needed (since the objects we would encounter at any “baptism” could be counted as instances of any number of  kinds),[8]  resulted in a the view sliding increasingly towards something that was at least molecularist in  structure.[9]