 A constant irritant for Ryle, throughout his writings, is “the preposterous assumption that every true or false statement either asserts or denies that a mentioned object or set of objects possesses a specified attribute” (1949a,  115).[13]  As an example of a kind of sentence whose primary job is other than fact-stating, consider laws. Although we speak of law-sentences as true or false, “they do not state truths or falsehoods of the same type as those asserted by the statements of fact to which they apply or are supposed to apply” (1949a, 116–7). The way to bring out the difference is to note that part of the point of trying to establish laws is to find out how to infer from particular matters of fact to other particular matters of fact, how to explain particular matters of fact by reference to other matters of fact, and how to bring about or prevent particular states of affairs.