High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In the philosophy of language, an empty name is a proper name that has no referent. The problem of empty names is that empty names have a meaning that it seems they shouldn't have. The name "Pegasus" is empty; there is nothing to which it refers. Yet though there is no Pegasus, we know what the sentence "Pegasus has two wings" means. We can even understand the sentence "There is no such thing as Pegasus." But what can the meaning of a proper name be, except the object to which it refers?