The slogan that ‘meaning is use’ is associated with the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. It has affinities with the claims of pragmatism, that the meaning of a sign consists in the set of practices following upon ‘acceptance of the symbol’. The difficulty is to characterize use in a sufficiently general way: no advantage over traditional ideas is gained if it is said, for instance, that the use of a predicate is to refer to a universal, or the use of a sentence is to express an associated proposition. A useful framework due to Sellars divides use into three parts: there are ‘entry rules’, describing the kinds of situation justifying application of a term, ‘exit rules’, describing the practical consequences of accepting the application of the term, and transformation rules taking us to other linguistic applications that themselves bear definite relations to the term.