As the theory is usually understood, it is the position that the semantic content of a name or other directly referring expression is nothing more than the referent: the referent is all that the name contributes to a proposition expressed by a sentence containing it.
Referential understanding (as developmental psychologists study it) includes understanding of the co-reference of various aspects of a multimodal referring expression, for example, when a mother points to an object for her baby and says, "look, that is a ball".
A major difference between the Fregean and the Russellian accounts is that for Frege every referring expression, whether a proper name or a description, has both a meaning and a referent, whereas for Russell proper names have referents but no meanings.
In general, a referring expression ("the president of the United States") in its de dicto reading picks out whoever or whatever may satisfy a certain condition, while in its de re reading it picks out the person or thing that in fact satisfies that condition.
Thus, the referring expression generator used only one relation, namely the "part-of" relation.
That is, should the referring expression say "chloroplast," "the chloroplast," "a chloroplast," or "any chloroplast"?
