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Knowledge and Understanding DAVID HUNTER Abstract: Jason Stanley has tried to revive the description theory of reference for natural kind terms by restricting it to experts. On his view, being an expert about elms requires having uniquely identifying knowledge about elms, knowledge that is conventionally associated with the term ‘elm’ and that fixes its reference. But Stanley’s attempt fails. For, as I show, even experts about elms can lack such knowledge by being epistemically irresponsible, mistaken or just plain cautious. The description theory of reference is false even when restricted to the most expert users of a term. Some philosophical proposals seem to die hard. In a recent paper, Jason Stanley has worked to resurrect the description theory of reference, at least as it might apply to natural kind terms like ‘elm’ (Stanley, 1999). The theory’s founding idea is that to understand ‘elm’ one must know a uniquely identifying truth about elms. Famously, Hilary Putnam showed that ordinary users of ‘elm’ may understand it while lacking such knowledge, and may even be unable to distinguish elms from beeches (Putnam, 1975). In response, Stanley claims that linguistic understanding in the case of natural kind terms comes in levels, and that only those at the top level need have the knowledge in question. The description theory, in Stanley’s hands, applies only to those with top level understanding and it is their understanding that fixes the term’s reference. To use the term successfully, those with inferior understanding need only be defer- ential to those at the top. However, Stanley’s appeal to expert knowledge fails to revive the description theory.1 Stanley calls the top level of understanding ‘full understanding’, and charac- terizes it in two ways. In one place, he says that it ‘is the sort of understanding one must have to discourse competently with experts’ (Stanle