Sellars has a complex view of what ties language to the world.  In the first instance, language is tied to the world, not by a single reference (or ‘satisfaction’) relation, but by the multitude of relationships — causal (in both directions), spatio-temporal, and normative — between tokens of linguistic expressions and the world.  Sellars does, however, single out for special attention a relation he calls picturing.  Though the notion of picturing is inspired by early Wittgenstein, in Sellars’s version it is a natural, non-semantic relation between objects, not facts.  The relata are, on the one hand, what Sellars calls ‘natural linguistic objects,’ tokens of linguistic expressions, and, on the other hand, objects in the world. The basic idea is that in any empirically meaningful language, the occurrences of a certain class of linguistic events (namely, first-level, atomic, matter-of-factual statements playing roles in observational and volitional contexts) have to constitute a map or picture of the surrounding environment in virtue of an isomorphism between the properties of worldly objects and counterpart properties of the linguistic events.  Sellars thinks this is a condition on any empirically meaningful language, but he also believes that one of the tasks of science is to improve the accuracy and refine the grain of such an isomorphism.  Sellars’s notion of picturing has puzzled many, but we can see an influence on Ruth Millikan’s biosemantics, as well as Huw Price’s recent (2011, 2013) distinction between e-representation and i-representation. 