Variation in Intuitions about Reference and Ontological Disagreements

Previous research suggests that intuitions about reference vary within and across cultures. After having examined and criticized some recent objections formulated against this body of research, I argue that, in combination with some plausible assumptions, variation of intuitions within and across cultures entails some form of referential pluralism - viz. the same word (e.g., "Paris" ) can refer differently for different competent speakers - and that, as a consequence, an infl uential kind of ontological disagreement (disagreements about whether there are such things as x's or whether x's are identical to y's) is vacuous. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.