   One influential response to this objection to this part of Brentano’s third thesis has been to grant a second-rate, i.e., a degraded and dependent, intentional status to sentences (see Haugeland 1981, Searle 1980, 1983, 1992, Fodor 1987). On this view, sentences of natural languages have no intrinsic meaning of and by themselves.  Nor do utterances of sentences have an intrinsic content. Sentences of natural languages would fail to have any meaning unless it was conferred to them by people who use them to express their thoughts and communicate them to others. Utterances borrow whatever ‘derived’ intentionality they have from the ‘original’ (or ‘primitive’) intentionality of human beings with minds that use them for their purposes (see Dennett 1987 for dissent). If, as Jerry Fodor (1975, 1987, 1994, 1998, 2008) has argued, there exists a “language of thought” consisting of mental symbols with syntactic and semantic properties, then possibly the semantic properties of mental symbols are the primary bearers of ‘original’ intentionality. (See the SEP entry for the  language of thought hypothesis.)