  Ultimately, the force of these worries remains unclear. For instance, Wayne Davis (2003) develops a conventionalist account that harkens back to the pre-Fregean tradition. In simplified form, Davis’s Lockean proposal is that a word is meaningful because we conventionally use it to express a certain “idea”. The meaning of a sentence is then determined by the meanings of its component words, along with the (conventionally determined) semantic import of the syntactic structure in which those words are arranged. Evidently, these issues connect with vexed questions about compositionality, linguistic understanding, the unity of the proposition, and the role played by formal semantic theories in the study of natural language.