 For there to be communication, there must be thought, and as we saw in the previous section, some philosophers deny that thought is possible without language. Dorit Bar-On defends a theory of intentional communication she calls expressive communication, according to which avowals are self-reports or expressions of one’s current mental states that have both an action component and a semantic component (Bar-On 2004). She argues that an appreciation of expressive communication can help us see how children and animals who lack language may yet still have thoughts (Bar-On 2019).