The book presents a critique of what has come to be called “the method of cases”—theorizing on the basis of the “application” of words to cases—as well as of the recent debates between “armchair” and “experimental” philosophers concerning that method. It argues that the method of cases as commonly practiced by both armchair and experimental philosophers is underwritten by a “representationalist” conception of language that is philosophically challengeable and empirically poorly supported—a conception on which the primary function of language is to record and communicate “classifications” or “categorizations” of worldly “items,” or “cases”, where what, if any, classifications a word (or expression) is fit to record and communicate, is taken to be determinable apart from any consideration of how it normally and ordinarily functions in discourse. The first part of the book shows that both defenders of the method (Williamson, Cappelen, Jackson, Nagel, and others) and those who have been critical of it (Stich, Cummins, Weinberg, Nado, and others), together with all practitioners of the method—armchair and experimental alike—have shown themselves committed to some version or another of that conception. The second part of the book challenges that conception. Drawing on ideas of Wittgenstein’s and of Merleau-Ponty’s, as well as on empirical studies of first language acquisition, it presents and motivates, both philosophically and empirically, a broadly pragmatist conception of language on which the method of cases as commonly practiced by both armchair and experimental philosophers is fundamentally misguided and bound to lead us astray.