 Concepts are first and foremost techniques for coping with their subject matters; only secondarily are they means of referring to particular constituents of those subject matters for the purpose of framing discursively structured true and false thoughts about them. And talk of discursively structured thoughts needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Tempting as it is to regard the meaning of a concept as a matter of the mind-independent thing or kind or relation to which it refers, tempting as it is to regard the content of a true or false thought as a matter of the mind-independent proposition the thought expresses, tempting as it is to regard the thoughts we think as arranging already meaningful concepts in much the way the sentences we speak arrange already meaningful words, such thinking underestimates the degree to which how we think is implicated in what we are able to think and what we are able to think about. Talk of referents and propositional contents and logical forms belongs to a formalistic picture of what thinking is like, a picture which is at best an intermittently convenient fiction.