© 2000 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. REFERENCE REMAINS INSCRUTABLE 123 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 81 (2000) 123–129 0279–0750/00/0100–0000 © 2000 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 123 REFERENCE REMAINS INSCRUTABLE  NICHOLAS GEORGALIS Abstract: Jerry Fodor has argued against Willard Quine’s claim that reference is inscrutable. Fodor argues by way of an analogy. I show that his argument begs the question against Quine (for a reason other than one that Fodor him- self identifies and corrects). Independently of this question-begging nature of Fodor’s argument, I show that there is a critical disanalogy between Fodor’s case and Quine’s. This disanalogy is itself sufficient to undermine Fodor’s argument. The inscrutability of reference remains unscathed. Jerry Fodor sets out to show that, contrary to Quine, reference is scrutable. 1 He imagines that there are two linguists, Ling1 and Ling2. Ling1 employs the homophonic translation manual, with the corresponding ordinary thing ontology, whereas Ling2 employs a deviant manual that has undetached proper parts of things as its corresponding ontology. There is an informant, Inf, who speaks the truth. Of course, in this context, speaking the truth does not determine the ontology, as ‘There is a rabbit’ is true on either ontology. 2 The idea is “[t]o find a datum that Ling1 can cope with and Ling2 can’t” (64) and, thereby, answer the question Q: “How do we know that ‘rabbit’ refers to rabbits and not to undetached proper parts of rab- bits (hereinafter urps)?” (58) I first argue that his initial argument begs the question against the inscrutability of reference, and it does so for a reason different from one that Fodor himself recognizes. His attempt to meet the latter problem consists in a defense of a needed additional premise, but this does nothing to address the true source of the question begging. In addition, I present two additional and independent refutations of Fodor’s argument.