Experiments on lay speakers’ intuitions about proper names have been taken to pose a challenge to traditional theorizing about reference. The experiments show that there is a great deal of variation in these intuitions, both across and within cultures, and it has been suggested that this casts doubt on some well-established semantic theses, in particular Kripke’s anti-descriptivism. In my talk I discuss how we should respond to these experiments and, more generally, the proper role of semantic intuitions in the philosophy of language.