 Indeed, another strategy that a Quinean can deploy to explain the appearance of the analytic is to claim that analyses are really not of the meanings of words, but of the actual phenomena in the world to which they refer (see Fodor, 1990b, 1998). Thus, claims that, e.g., cats are animals, triangles are three-sided, or that every number has a successor should not be construed as claims about the meanings of the words “cat”, “triangle” or “number,” but about the nature of cats, triangles and numbers themselves. Arguably, many such claims, if they are true, are necessarily so (cf., Kripke, 1972; Putnam, 1975), and may be commonly understood to be, and this might make them seem analytic. But then we would be faced with precisely the challenge that Quine raised: how to distinguish claims of analyticity from simply deeply held beliefs about “the nature” of things.