 Some variation (of psychological states) must of course be allowed, else we shall end with a fictitious entity, serene and thoroughly useless amid the complexities of actual practice; but ‘meaning’ is a term wanted for marking off something relatively constant amid these complexities, not merely for paying them deference. A sense is needed where a sign may ‘mean’ less than it ‘suggests’—a sense in which meanings are helpful to the understanding of many contexts, not some vagrant sense in which a word has a wholly different ‘meaning’ every time it is used. (1944, 43)