The literature on passives disagrees on whether the Implicit External Argument (IEA) of short passives is projected in syntax as a covert pronominal element or represented only semantically as an existentially bound variable in argument structure. Visibility of the implicit external argument for Binding Theory is often mentioned as an argument for the syntactic view. This paper critically reviews Disjoint Reference Effects in short passives and argues that they cannot be derived from Principles B or C of Binding Theory. On the one hand, this would wrongly predict some Disjoint Reference Effects to be absent. On the other hand, it would wrongly filter out examples where the implicit external argument of a passive can, in fact, be co-valued either with an impersonal pronoun or with a second instance of an implicit external argument in a higher clause. It is argued that these instances of co-valuation are not established via binding or coreference but result from pragmatic inferences of accommodation in the sense of Koenig & Mauner (2000). This perspective is substantiated with empirical evidence showing that, even in contexts where impersonal pronouns can bind or can be bound, implicit external arguments of passives cannot bind and cannot be bound. All this suggests that the latter are not syntactically active.