 According to Stevenson, explaining emotive and descriptive meaning in this psychological sense of ‘meaning’ would be promising if it did not encounter an immediate problem that “has long been one of the most troublesome aspects of linguistic theory” (1944, 42; 1937, 20). The problem, as Stevenson saw it, is that the meaning of an expression must be relatively stable across a variety of social and linguistic contexts, lest the expression be unhelpful to our understanding of the many contexts in which the expression is used; however, the psychological states associated with an expression vary widely across social and linguistic contexts. At a football game, for example, ‘Hooray!’ may be shouted in connection with terrific excitement, but at other times with little emotion at all; likewise, to a postmaster who regularly sorts the mail, “‘Connecticut’ may cause only a toss of the hand, but for an old resident it may bring a train of reminiscences” (1944, 43). Similarly, the sentence ‘This legislation is just’ may be used to express a favorable attitude towards a particular piece of legislation, but not when embedded within the more complex sentence ‘Vote for this legislation only if it is just’. Thus,