 Perhaps these considerations should motivate the descriptivist to abandon “great deeds” descriptions in favor of metalinguistic descriptions like ‘the person named ‘Bill Gates’’ or causal descriptions like ‘the person that stands at the origin of this chain of uses of the name ‘Bill Gates’’. (For discussion, see [Bach 1981, 2002], [Kroon 1987], and [Lewis 1984].) It is plausible that semantic competence suffices to know that the sentence ‘Bill Gates is named ‘Bill Gates’’ is true and, while perhaps importing extra-semantic facts about language use, it is plausible that any reflective speaker of English knows that any token of ‘Bill Gates is the person that stands at the origin of this chain of uses of the name ‘Bill Gates’’ is true. So these descriptions seem to survive the semantic argument presented in the previous paragraph. But they face another objection, also facing simpler versions of descriptivism: Namely, the modal objection ([Kripke 1972]). While it is absolutely impossible that Bill Gates is not Bill Gates, it is, it seems, metaphysically possible that Bill Gates is not the richest person alive, instead being a middle American, and it seems metaphysically possible that he is not named ‘Bill Gates’ and does not stand at the causal origin of any particular chain of uses of the name ‘Bill Gates’, unless the chain is individuated in part in terms of the actual individual that grounds it.  This suggests that ordinary proper names and their alleged descriptive equivalents considered above are not, in fact, semantically equivalent, as they embed differently under modals like ‘it is necessary that’. [See the entry on  names  for further discussion of these problems.]