 In his seminal article “Pragmatics” (1970) Stalnaker proposed a conception of semantics and pragmatics that would allow the tools and traditions of formal semantics to be extended to pragmatics. The pragmatic phenomena he mainly had in mind are what we are calling “near-side pragmatics,” involving the way in which, in the setting of natural language, contextual factors interact with conventional meaning to determine what is said, or the proposition expressed. Stalnaker uses his pragmatic theory to deal with issues that might be thought to require a semantic explanation, such as the informativeness of identity statements (“Hesperus is Phosphorus”) and the import of negative existentials (“Homer did not exist”); in doing so he saw himself as continuing in a Gricean tradition: 