Of course, someone who points at a cow and says “That is a horse” might still, in some contexts, be judged to have made a perfectly acceptable contribution to the conversation, for instance, if they were making a joke, or using the term horse metaphorically or ironically. Yet this doesn’t seem to entail that the English word horse must literally mean something like ‘horse-or-cow’; rather, what it shows is that sometimes we use bits of language to convey things other than their literal meaning. It seems that we, as ordinary speakers, are sensitive to a difference between standing meaning and what we might call conveyed or communicated meaning. In philosophy of language, this has come to be understood as a difference between “semantic” meaning on the one hand, which picks out something like literal meaning, and “pragmatic” meaning on the other, which focuses on communicated, contextually derived meaning.