The linguistic turn that philosophy took at the beginning of the twentieth century was not only exhibited as a concern with formal logic, but also manifested itself by an intense enquiry into the nature of linguistic meaning. One of the functions of language is representation or reference. We use linguistic symbols to stand for or represent some item or entity in the world such as a person or an event. While the theories of meaning that were developed in conjunction with formal logic by Frege and Russell differed significantly in their approach to language generally, they took similar approaches to explaining designation with respect to ordinary proper names. Their views, or versions of them, dominated the theory of naming in the philosophy of language in the twentieth century prior to Kripke. Kripke was not alone in rasing problems with the orthodox view of the naming relation, but his work has had a great influence on both the subsequent developments in the philosophy of language and the theory of naming. To help understand Kripke's contribution, we first present the philosophical context in which it occurred.

One natural account of the meaning of a word or phrase is that a word or phrase means what it stands for or refers to. This was Mill's view for naming expressions. The meaning of a naming phrase such as ‘the current prime minister’ or ‘Tony Blair’ is simply the person to whom the expression refers.