 Imagine a debate between two friends over whether or not boats are ships. One party points to a rowboat and says, “That boat is a ship. After all, a ship is a vessel that floats on water and the rowboat is obviously a vessel that floats on water.” The second party disagrees: “A ship is a sufficiently large vessel that floats on water and the rowboat is not sufficiently large. So the boat is not a ship.” Clearly, there is something defective about this debate. First, there are two “candidate meanings” for the predicate ‘ship’—namely a vessel that floats on water and a sufficiently large vessel that floats on water. Second, neither of these candidate meanings is more “natural” than the other—unlike ‘water’ or ‘electron’, the predicate ‘ship’ does not correspond to a natural kind in the world. Third, the two parties to the debate agree on all of the “non-ship” facts—in particular, both parties agree that the rowboat is a vessel, that it floats on water, and that it is relatively small in size. Given these points, it is tempting to say that the two parties agree on all of the facts and that their dispute is merely verbal. Note that this conclusion is consistent with the view that one of the parties is actually mistaken. Suppose, for example, that semantic externalism is correct and the meanings of our terms are determined, in part, by overall use (see the entry on  externalism about mental content).  In that case, the first party to our debate is presumably mistaken, since English-speakers do not use the term ‘ship’ for rowboats. Still, there is a sense in which the debate is verbal, for there is a possible language (“English*”) that (a) employs a different, equally natural meaning for ‘ship’, (b) is adequate for describing all of the facts, and (c) is such that the first party’s statements would be true in that language. Thus, we might say that the real dispute between the two parties is over whether or not English is English*. And that is clearly a verbal dispute.