 Fodor (1981: 177–203; 1987: 16–26) proposes a theory of propositional attitudes that assigns a central role to mental representations. A    mental representation  is a mental item with semantic properties (such as a denotation, or a meaning, or a truth-condition, etc.). To believe that p, or hope that p, or intend that p, is to bear an appropriate relation to a mental representation whose meaning is that p. For example, there is a relation belief* between thinkers and mental representations, where the following biconditional is true no matter what English sentence one substitutes for “p”: