 Quine’s discussion of the role of convention in science seems right; but how about the role of meaning in ordinary natural language (cf. Chomsky’s 2000 cautions mentioned in  footnote 10)?  Is it really true that in the “pale grey lore” of all the sentences we accept, there aren’t some that are “white” somehow “by virtue of the very meanings of their words”? What about our examples in our earlier set II? What about sentences of the sort that interest Juhl and Loomis (2010) that merely link patent synonyms, as in “Lawyers are attorneys,” or “A fortnight is a period of fourteen days”? As Grice and Strawson (1956) and Putnam (1965 [1975]) pointed out, it is unlikely that so intuitively plausible a distinction should turn out to have no basis at all in fact.