It was one of Freud's major contributions to make us aware of what might be called the ambiguity of everyday life. Every utterance, he showed us, no matter how simple, has many meanings; surface is always deceptive; and the complete truth of any statement may be always out of reach. This position is now being echoed from other traditions. The philosopher Searle, for example, has recently taken the position that for a “large class of sentences, there is no such thing as the zero or null context for the interpretation of the sentences, and that as far as our semantic competence is concerned, we understand the meaning of such sentences only against a set of background assumptions about the contexts in which the sentence could be appropriately uttered” (p. ). In a chapter on literal meanings, he shows how even the simple assertion “The cat is on the mat” can take on different meanings depending on different background assumptions. Not only are assumptions critical to understanding; Searle makes the disturbing claim that there are always an indefinite number of