Communicating content

•Outline the key problematic in the debate about communication.•Avoid problems of the locking view by strengthening the reference-fixing conditions.•We establish a more robust causal relation between concepts and their referents.•Weaken the conditions on communication that the neo-descriptivist requires.•Partial overlap between possessors of the same concept suffices for communication.

This paper aims to develop a unified account of communication, competence and reference fixing that surpasses problems with two of the most influential views on the philosophical market, neodescriptivism and the 'locking' theory. Our charge is that the conditions upon communication are less substantive than the neo-descriptivist account requires and the conditions upon reference-fixing are more substantive than those provided by the locking-view. In order to avoid the problems that neodescriptivist views face (e.g. holism), we suggest that the shareability of a specific set of inferences, or dispositions to infer, is not a prerequisite for conceptual shareability. In order to avoid the infamous ‘which-properties-speakers-lock-on’ problem of the locking-view, we establish a more robust causal relation between concepts and their referents.