A related concern is that the deflationary nominalist introduces a non-standard notion of reference that does not presuppose the existence of the objects that are referred to (Bueno and Zalta 2005). This move goes hand in hand with the understanding of the quantifiers as not being ontologically committing, and it does seem to limit the deflationary nominalist's capacity to take mathematical language literally. After all, a special use of ‘refers’ is needed to accommodate the claim that “‘a’ refers to b, but b does not exist”. The deflationary nominalist, however, resists this charge (Azzouni 2009a, 2010a, 2010b).