 W.V.O. Quine is probably the most famous reference skeptic. In his (1960), he argued that reference is inherently indeterminate or ‘inscrutable’. By this, Quine means that there is no fact of the matter about what our words refer to. This is not to say that our words refer to something but we are unable to determine what that is. Rather, there is simply no such thing as that to which our words refer. Nevertheless, Quine does not go so far as to say that our words fail to refer in any sense. His view is rather that it makes sense to speak of what our words refer to only relative to some purpose we might have in assigning referents to those words. Quine’s argument for the inscrutability thesis involves an application of the thesis that empirical theories are underdetermined by their supporting evidence. For any body of empirical evidence we might have about speakers of a given language, there will be a number of competing theories regarding what their words refer to. Such theories will be empirically equivalent, equally consistent with the empirical data. One theory might say that, in the language in question, ‘gavagai’ refers to rabbits; another might say that it refers to undetached rabbit parts; a third might say that it refers to time-slices of rabbits. Quine’s views on underdetermination can be applied to one’s own language as well. The result is that the available evidence no more forces the speaker to the conclusion that by ‘rabbit’ she means rabbits than it forces her to conclude that by ‘rabbit’ she means undetached rabbit parts or time-slices of rabbits. If a speaker observes herself using the word ‘rabbit,’ the evidence she amasses will give equal support to all three theories, as well as to many others. So, according to Quine, for any given body of empirical evidence, there will be numerous competing theories as to what the words one uses refer to. And there will be no principled way of adjudicating between these  theories.[15]