 A particularly vivid way to feel the force of Quine’s challenge is afforded by a recent case that came before the Ontario Supreme Court concerning whether laws that confined marriage to heterosexual couples violated the equal protection clause of the constitution (see Halpern et al. 2001). The question was regarded as turning in part on the meaning of the word “marriage”, and each party to the dispute solicited affidavits from philosophers, one of whom claimed that the meaning of the word was tied to heterosexuality, another that it wasn’t. Putting aside the complex moral-political issues, Quine’s challenge can be regarded as a reasonably sceptical request to know how any serious theory of the world might settle it. It certainly wouldn’t be sufficient merely to claim that marriage is/isn’t necessarily heterosexual on the basis of common “platitudes,” much less on “an act of rational insight [into] the propositional content itself”; or because speakers found the inference from marriage to heterosexuality “primitively compelling” and couldn’t imagine gay people getting  married![17]