Your assertions are claims on my beliefs; your requests and commands are claims on my actions; your expressions—of pain, joy, or opinion—may be claims on my attitudes. But I cannot properly assess, act upon, or react to what you say unless I understand it. If you show me a photograph of a woman you call your mother but at the same time claim that she is not a member of your family, I may not know what to think until I learn what you mean by “mother” and “family”; that is, how you are using or applying these expressions in the circumstances.

We learn in what Ryle described as the “hard-school of daily life” the “inflections” of meanings or “elasticities of significance” for common general terms (such as “mother” and “family” in my example above) and the sort of phenomena that count as falling under them. Indeed, most if not all expressions of natural languages have these elasticities and belong to what Wittgenstein called a “family of structures, more or less related to one another.” This network can be revealed when we consider the different implication or logical threads of a sentence as it is employed on various occasions. These logical threads or ties include, for example, what would count as evidence; as justification or warrant; as implied, permitted, or otherwise consistent or compatible; as contrary, contradictory, or otherwise inconsistent or incompatible; as incurred commitments and liabilities; or as a successful or appropriate uptake or reaction; and so on. Mentioning any one of these is among the ways we may spell out what we mean or what we are trying to say. It is for this reason that an answer to the questions “What is your evidence?,” “What are your grounds?,” “What is your point?,” or even “Show me!” may help us to understand what is said. In short, given the elasticities of significance in any given expression, understanding the force of the utterance and its logical ties will often enable us to glean the way its constituent expressions are applied.