 It would be interesting to see this exercise carried out in full, but what would it show? Not that a certain core of knowledge must constitute the meaning of “Socrates”. There is always the possibility that “Socrates” has no meaning. Even if the account of what determines the reference of a name has an a priori core, we may yet conclude that such reference is determined extra-semantically. Perhaps the a priori core is simply an (a priori) theory of reference in general, applied to the special case of “Socrates”.