Quite recently, several ongoing disputes in semantics have gained attention. Some of these disputes include questions about whether we would apply the term ‘pencil’ to objects that satisfy the superficial description of the properties associated with classic artifactual pencils but are in fact a species of organisms; whether ‘woman’ applies only to females; or whether the rules governing the application of terms for natural substances and species (e.g., ‘water’, ‘tiger’, gold’, etc.) are the same as those governing the application of words for artifacts and artifactual kinds (like ‘chair’, ‘pencil’, ‘television’, etc.) or social and institutional kinds (e.g., ‘pediatrician’, ‘university’, ‘parent’, etc.). These disputes in semantics, I argue, are also disputes about what the referents in question are--that is, they are also metaphysical disputes. The aim of this paper is to show how abandoning the traditional “heavyweight meta-metaphysical realism” within which such disputes are typically framed, in favor of Amie L. Thomasson’s normativist, pragmatic approach, allows us to see them as “metalinguistic negotiations”. That is, these are best understood as disputes about how the words in question ought to be applied rather than about how they are in fact applied. I thus highlight several advantages of this pragmatic perspective, which I label a “Negotiating Approach”. It offers a more viable and appealing explanation of why such disputes arise in the first place, it avoids the epistemological mysteries faced by traditional accounts, and provides a more promising attempt to address or (dis)solve such quarrels. Moreover, I argue that this approach reveals that meaning is a variable whose value can be negotiated according to pragmatic and empirical factors (including nature, authority, ethics, and other contextual considerations.). This recognition is crucial for its further pragmatic import, which represents an additional advantage of the approach proposed: meaning can be revised and engineered in line with these relevant factors.