The key difficulty facing conceptual relativism is that of formulating the position in a coherent but non-trivial manner. Trivial versions allow that the world can be described in different ways, but make no claims to the incompatibility of these descriptions. The charge of incoherence arises from the claim that there could be genuinely conflicting and equally true accounts or descriptions of one and the same phenomenon. To use an example that is the corner-stone of Hilary Putnam’s conceptual relativity, Putnam claims that the simple question how many objects there are (say on a given table) could be answered variously depending on whether we use “a mereological or a Carnapian, common-sense, method of individuating objects”. In circumstances where a Carnapian counts three objects A, B and C, a mereologist will count seven: A, B, C, plus the mereological sum objects A+B, A+C, B+C, A+B+C. As Putnam puts it: