While the inscrutability of reference concerns itself with single words, Quine does not want it to be used for propositions, as he attacks those in another way.
Therefore, one has to blindly accept the validity of this hypothesis, or try to make sense of it via reflecting upon the idea[clarification needed].
The inscrutability of reference can also be used in a more extended way, in order to explain Quine's theory of ontological relativity.
He, however, insisted that he belongs in neither of these categories,[5] and some authors see in the inscrutability of reference an underdetermination of relativism.
As a special part of this theory the inscrutability of reference indicates that, in trying to find out to which object a certain word (also sentence, sign etc.)
However, when shouting gavagai and pointing at a rabbit, the natives could as well refer to something like undetached rabbit-parts or rabbit-tropes and it would not make any observable difference.
The behavioural data the linguist could collect from the native speaker would be the same in every case, or to reword it, several translation hypotheses could be built on the same sensoric stimuli.
Quine regards this discovery as trivial, because it is already a widely accepted fact that all the different things one word might refer to can be switched out, because of their proxy functions.
[8] To make sense of the word gavagai either way, the linguist simply has to assume that the native speaker does not refer to complicated terms like rabbits-tropes.
On Putnam's account, the idea that we refer with our sentences and statements to a mind-independent, nonlinguistic world is an illusion.
Further he claims that the problem to deal with is a language philosophical one and uses Quine's inscrutability of reference theory to clarify his point of view.