Philosophical studies of natural language serve two purposes: (a) They enhance our understanding of the role played by language within the framework of major facets of human life, such as thought, knowledge or scientific explanation, and (b) they enhance our understanding of language itself. Pragmatics, in some sense of the term, has been involved in the pursuit of each of these purposes. A particularly illuminating example of how pragmatics, in a sense, appears in a philosophical study of language of type (a) is Bas van Fraassen’s philosophical theory of scientific explanation (van Fraassen 1980). The analysis of scientific explanation in terms of using ‘why?’- questions is not a singular case of a link between an interesting concept and knowledge of some language use. Various links have been exposed, suggested and discussed. One of the most important and profound among those links involves language and thought. For many proponents of analytical philosophy, it has been a basic tenet of their philosophical view, “that the philosophy of thought can be approached only through the philosophy of language […]". The view that deems philosophical studies of language to be the very foundations of philosophy in general should not be confused with two other general approaches that were used during earlier stages of the same philosophical tradition. Such as logical positivists and supporters of ordinary language philosophy. For many years now, even philosophical studies of language itself have not been confined to linguistic minutiae. The philosophical standards of rigor and explicitness that have been some of the emblems of analytical philosophy, have been applied to the problem of what the object of study is, or, what should be investigated when natural language is under consideration? Discussions of this problem have had two foci. One problem is that of the identification of natural language. The second problem is that of the basic nature of natural language. Unlike linguists, who supposedly are in pursuit of understanding all aspects of natural language, philosophers have had only a few of these aspects under intensive consideration. Although some philosophical work has been done in areas such as phonology (e.g. Bromberger & Halle 1991), most of the philosophical work on natural language has pertained to semantics and pragmatics, and to the former more than to the latter. Philosophical attraction to pragmatics was created as a natural result of dissatisfaction with theories of meaning that had been, in a sense, purely semantic, particularly under the influence of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of ‘meaning as use’ (Wittgenstein 1953; for an analytical commentary, see Baker & Hacker 1980, 1985.) Programmatic theories that have emerged within philosophy of language often lend themselves to use for appropriate development of theories within linguistics. Philosophical theories of ‘logical form’, of ‘possible worlds’ and of ‘speech acts’, for example, have been used for theoretical purposes within linguistic frameworks without severe interface problems. Philosophical theories, though of a programmatic nature, have made important contributions to the development of pragmatics, mostly by creating conceptual frameworks for theoretical discussions of highly important families of linguistic facts and by putting forward and examining in a critical way general theoretical claims about ways of language use. Major topics in this endeavor have been general work on pragmatics; issues related to the delineation of pragmatics; and speech act theory. Much philosophical work has also been done on particular speech acts, such as asserting, promising, asking, commanding, and numerous other ones. Other topics that have received major treatments include reference, indexicals, presuppositions, and and implicatures.