 How does the deflationist tell that an ontological dispute is a ‘merely verbal’ one? Hirsch thinks that when we interpret the words of another, we assign truth-conditions to their sentences by matching those sentences with sets of possible worlds, guided by the metasemantic maxim that the speaker’s assertion of those sentences should come out true. The maxim applies to ontological disputes such as the Ernie/Maxi dispute about mereology — there are possible languages in which both speakers’ assertions come out true. Hirsch contends: “speakers of either language should allow that speakers of the other language assert sentences that have the same characters (DK: functions from contexts of utterance to truth-conditions) and the same truth-values as they themselves assert.” [Hirsch 2009, p.242]. 