Crucially, however, because the reference relation is external, competent users of a term can be radically mistaken about what the term refers to and still successfully refer.
Our focus will be on semantic theories of word meaning, i.e., on theories that try to provide an answer to such questions as "what is the nature of word meaning?", "what do we know when we know the meaning of a word?", and "what (kind of) information must an agent associate to the words of a language L in order to be a competent user of the lexicon of L?".
To emphasize this point, it is estimated that English has approximately a million words, though a college graduate might know only between 60,000 to 75,000 of these, and yet be a competent user of the language [20].
In a particularly well-known version of this example, we consider Earth as it was around 1750, before the chemical structure of water was discovered, and we consider an inhabitant of Earth named "Oscar" who is a competent user of the term 'water'water
Such essential properties of kinds are features, therefore, that may be unknown even to competent users of a relevant kind concept.
Every single person is turning their eyes!" Instead, in the context, we know immediately what the sentence means and if we're a competent user of the language we don't give it a second thought.
Kripke and Putnam attacked a pair of related views about natural kind terms: descriptivist semantics (the meaning of such a term is a description satisfied by all and only members of the kind) and internalism (the meaning of such a term, the relevant description, is fully grasped by competent users of the term so that what fixes the extension of the term supervenes on what is internal to the user).
Rather, it is to say that competent users of the term tacitly make those assumptions.
Perhaps the meaning of a predicate is not as transparent to competent users of the predicate as Moore implicitly assumes.
