  At this point we need to distinguish two kinds of indeterminacy. Quine introduces the general idea of indeterminacy, in Chapter Two of (1960), without explicitly distinguishing the two, but subsequently comes to treat them quite differently. The first is indeterminacy of reference: some sentences can be translated in more than one way, and the various versions differ in the reference that they attribute to parts of the sentence, but not in the overall net import that they attribute to the sentence as a whole. (Quine uses the terms “ontological relativity” and “inscrutability of reference”, as well as “indeterminacy of reference”. Some philosophers have sought to distinguish these doctrines, but in later work Quine makes it clear that he uses the terms simply as different names for the same thing. See Ricketts 2011, Roth, 1986, and Quine 1986d.) To use an example which has become famous, a given sentence might be translated as “There’s a rabbit” or as “Rabbithood is manifesting itself there” or as “There are undetached rabbit parts”, or in other ways limited only by one’s ingenuity. All that is needed is what Quine calls a proxy function, which maps each object onto another object and each predicate onto one which is true of a given proxy-object if and only if the original predicate is true of the original object. For terms referring to physical objects, he suggests, we can take the proxy-function to map each object onto its space-time complement. The change to the translation of singular terms and the change to the translation of predicates cancel out, leaving the overall significance of the sentence unchanged. The claim of indeterminacy of reference is not in any way a claim about what goes on in the language-user’s mind (pace Wright 1997). (Note that it will not help to ask the person we are translating whether she means to refer to the family dog or to its space-time complement: her answer is subject to the same indeterminacy.)