   A fundamental question for philosophy of language is how meaning arises from use. How do we confer significance upon inherently meaningless linguistic expressions by employing them in linguistic practice? Neo-Gricean accounts such as Lewis’s, Schiffer’s, and Bennett’s provide detailed answers to this question. For instance, Lewis isolates a self-perpetuating communicative mechanism that systematically associates sentences with propositional contents. He reduces social convention to the propositional attitudes of individual speakers, and he then uses social convention to explain how meaning arises from use. He thereby depicts linguistic expressions as inheriting content from antecedently contentful propositional attitudes. On this approach, thought is the primary locus of intentionality, and language enjoys intentional content merely in a derivative way, through its employment in communicative transactions. That general view of the relation between language and thought goes back at least to Book III of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. It is currently quite popular. Much of its popularity stems from the widespread perception that Lewis’s account, or some other such account, successfully explains how language inherits content from thought.