 Indeed, as many philosophers in the wake of Quine’s and Putnam’s work came to suspect, the recourse of philosophy in general to epistemology to ground semantics may have been a fundamental mistake. It was an enticing recourse: it seemed to offer a way to dispatch philosophical disputes and secure empirical knowledge from sceptical challenges regarding demons and dreams. But the above difficulties suggested that those disputes and challenges would need to be met in some other way, perhaps by looking not to words, but to the world instead.