It is used as an introduction to his theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to prove the point of inscrutability of reference.
Hearing a lot of utterances of the one-word-sentence 'Gavagai' whenever the linguist sees rabbits, he suspects the one-word-sentence 'Rabbit' to be the correct translation and starts a process of questioning and pointing until he is reasonably certain that the native has the verbal disposition to assent to 'Gavagai' if seeing the stimulus, a rabbit.
Collateral information can also create a difference of stimulus meaning between members of the same language community.
To solve this issue, the linguist will determine intrasubjective stimulus synonymy, enabling the pairing of non-observational occasion sentences such as 'Bachelor' and 'Unmarried man'.
Starting off with the easiest task, to translate logical connectives, the linguist formulates questions where by pairing logical connectives with occasion sentences and going through several rounds of writing down the assent or dissent to these questions from the natives to establish a translation.
This indeterminacy is not meaningless, as it is possible to construct two separate translation manuals that are equally correct yet incompatible with each other due to having opposing truth values.