This is a version of a use theory of meaning.  Sellars distinguishes three different generic dimensions of usage: language-entry transitions, intralinguistic transitions, and language-exit transitions.  Some examples: Contexts of perception and observation are those in which one enters a language in response to some form of sensory stimulation.  The announcement of a resolution followed by an action that attempts to carry it out is a case of exiting a language.  Intralinguistic transitions include inferences and responses of one kind or another.  In contrast to Quine’s emphasis on occasion sentences, Sellars puts particular emphasis on the importance of intralinguistic connections, an aspect of his view that has been further developed in Robert Brandom’s inferentialism.  Sellars distinguishes formal inferences, which are a matter of the syntactic rules of the language, from material inferences, which are not a function of syntactic structure alone.  The inference from ‘This is red’ to ‘This is colored’ is one example of a material inference, but, in Sellars’s view, so is the inference from ‘It is raining’ to ‘The street will be wet’.  Material inferences are not merely enthymemes ultimately to be made good by supplying an explicit principle: the web of material inferences an expression is involved in, especially the subjunctives it sustains, determines its core meaning.