This all does sound good to me; but, is there a way to say the above while tabooing "reference" and avoiding talk of things "referring" to other things? Reference isn't ontologically basic, so what does it reduce to?

Basically, the main part that would worry me is a phrase like, "there's a story to be told about how our moral concepts came to pick out these particular worldly properties" which sounds on its face like, "There's a story to be told about how successorship came to pick out the natural numbers" whereas what I'd want to say is, "Of course, there's a story to be told about how moral concepts came to have the power to move us" or "There's a story to be told about how our brains came to reflect numbers".