  Waiving that objection, suppose that John does answer with a purely qualitative description, such as ‘the man wearing a green shirt, red trousers, and white shoes who is pushing a shopping cart’. Still, the description he uses may fail to refer to the person to whom John referred when he uttered ‘he’. Imagine that the mirror has distorted the color of the trousers that John sees: the trousers he sees (namely, his own trousers) appear red to him in the mirror, but they are in fact purple. So the preceding description does not pick out John. Now suppose further that there is a man who does fit the description perfectly, but he is in a grocery store far from John, and is not making a mess. Then the purely qualitative descriptivist theory entails that ‘He is making a mess’ is false in John’s context. But the sentence John utters is true in his context, contrary to the theory.