Inscrutability of reference

The inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference (also referential inscrutability) is a thesis by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his book Word and Object.^[1] The main claim of this theory is that any given sentence can be changed into a variety of other sentences where the parts of the sentence will change in what they reference, but they will nonetheless maintain the meaning of the sentence as a whole.^[2] The referential relation is inscrutable, because it is subject to the background language and ontological commitments of the speaker.