 Linguistic acts seem to share such properties with mental states. Suppose I say that democracy is dying. I am talking about democracy, and if what I say of it (that it is dying) is true of it, then my utterance is true. Now, to say that democracy is dying is (in part) to utter a sentence that means that democracy is dying. Many philosophers have thought that the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are inherited from the intentional mental states they are conventionally used to express (Grice 1957, Fodor 1978, Schiffer1972/1988, Searle 1983). On this view, the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are the semantic properties of the representations that are the mental relata of the states they are conventionally used to express. Fodor has famously argued that these states themselves have a language-like structure. (See the entry on the   language of thought hypothesis.)  