What are particulars? I was thinking that the notion of a metaphor shares some similarities. What makes a metaphor, a metaphor? It is a word being used in a non-literal sense: that is, there is (1) the literal sense (the general rules and semantics of the language), (2) the current situational context, and (3) the interaction between them. A metaphor, qua metaphor, is the interaction and is not either of the interactors.
Similarly, a particular thing seems to be something existing between two different levels. Take a fire burning in front of me. On the one hand, it is a bunch of universal physical laws - it is an instantiation of heat, motion, release of energy, and so on. (Of course, this is tendentious, but I think that there are good reasons for assuming the reality of at least linguistic rules.) On this level, though, where is the particular? Everything is universal. There is also the situation: the fire is part of a context, warming a room, boiling water for tea, and so on. Yet again, however, we don't have a particular, since it all gets subsumed under the situation. The particular is something liminal, something appearing only as the general laws (like the overall language and its typical meaning) interact with the completely concrete situation (like the current paragraph, piece, or poem). Like metaphors, particulars have meaning as a real interaction, but are not some object existing outside of that.
Maybe, in addition, the interaction itself is produced by us - we mix things together. We take sights, sounds, smells, and tastes with a touch of reason and spin them together. So the problem of particulars arises because we exist on different levels and navigate them simultaneously, so we need some way in which they hold together for pragmatics.
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