Inscrutability of reference

The inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference (also indeterminacy of reference, or referential inscrutability) is a thesis propounded by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his book Word and Object. The main claim of this theory is that any given sentence can be changed into a variety of other sentences where the parts of the sentence will change in what they reference, but they will nonetheless maintain the meaning of the sentence as a whole. The referential relation is inscrutable, because it is subject to the background language and ontological commitments of the speaker.