A proper name like 'Smith' can be used with referential intentions that lead a speaker to refer to a different individual than the name's semantic referent (e.g., referring to Jones when seeing someone who resembles Smith)

The notion of definition here has to be taken as a heavy-weight notion: ‘bank’ is ambiguous even though you can ‘define’ it as ‘financial institution or river side’. However, we can get a reasonable grip on what Aristotle had in mind. ‘Uncle’ is not ambiguous because it has a single definition that covers both: x is an uncle iff x is the brother of y and y has a child. The test depends partly on how strict we are about what counts as a definition. And on the assumption that there are interesti