Interestingly, contact through direct reference circumvents not only description but any kind of representational cognition. This is the great move made by Kripke: he doesn’t need to commit to any dodgy epistemological notions such as ‘acquaintance’; direct reference is not an epistemological item. As a consequence, reference can be thought of as (relatively) independent of epistemology, as Howard Wettstein often insisted, and semantic content is no longer to be thought as in the head[iii]. Externalism is an interesting idea brought forward by direct reference and has a salient family resemblance with externalism towards cognitive justification. The idea that semantic properties are part of the furniture of the universe through linguistic contact and epistemic properties pave sthe way to new forms of realism.