 Thus, perceptions and qualities are discriminations made in inquiry and language; they are not reports of ontological entities which are simple, ultimate, or discrete. Always, pragmatic factors are decisive. (Dewey makes the same point about nouns and concepts; cf. W.V.O. Quine’s example of “gavagai”.) “Perception”, then, is shorthand for the more complicated processes of interacting events. “Red” is an abstraction from more complex experiences (such as red-car-merging-into-my-lane), and the pragmatic question becomes, What is the function of this abstraction? How does it mediate thought or action for future experiences? (“A Naturalistic Theory of Sense-Perception”, LW2: 51; EN, LW1: 198–199)