Do texts generated by language models (LMs) refer? Mandelkern and Linzen (2024) argue that externalist principles point to an affirmative conclusion. What grounds reference, according to their externalism, is a term’s “natural history”. For example, ‘water’ refers to H 2 O among English speakers, and not to the phenomenally indistinguishable chemical XYZ, because H 2 O, and not XYZ, is implicated in the natural history of ‘water’. Appealing to the literature on contrastive explanation, I show that a term’s natural history does not generally ground its referential properties. Thus, Mandelkern and Linzen’s quick route to the referentiality of LM-generated texts fails.