 Hirsch’s novel and intriguing idea is that what makes the endurantist/perdurantist temporal parts debate and the nihilist/universalist mereological debate merely verbal ones is the fact that the protagonists in these debates mean different things by their quantifiers, in particular their existential quantifiers, in their ontological assertions. While both protagonists speak a common language, here English, in which certain ontological claims such as ‘there are tables’ happen to come out true, this is a superficial socio-linguistic fact about English that might not have been so: we and they could just as easily have spoken English* (an ontological nihilist language) in which the sentence ‘there are tables’ came out false. Protagonists in these ontological disputes are, unwittingly, engaged in a ‘merely verbal’ debate and are thus talking past each  other.[13] 