  (i) The Mīmāṃsakas and Grammarians were ‘essentialists’ about meaning, arguing that the Sanskrit language is a natural entity, independent of human convention or usage, whose words possess intrinsic semantic powers to signify objects, just as fire has the intrinsic capacity to burn. The Naiyāyikas traditionally opposed this view, arguing instead that language is a product of convention, and that it is possible to account for a word’s semantic power in terms of stipulations governing its use. The claim is that we can define (and hence analyse) the meaning-relation thus: