 Quine insists that the student’s elimination argument is only a reductio ad absurdum of the supposition that the student knows that the announcement is true (rather than a reductio of the announcement itself). He accepts this epistemic reductio but rejects the metaphysical reductio. Given the student’s ignorance of the announcement, Quine concludes that a test on any day would be unforeseen. That is, Quine accepts that the student has no advance knowledge of the time of the test, but he rejects that there is no truth in advance as to when the test will be given.