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The 17th-century British empiricist John Locke held that linguistic meaning is mental: words are used to encode and convey thoughts, or ideas. Successful communication requires that the hearer correctly decode the speaker’s words into their associated ideas. So construed, the meaning of an expression, according to Locke, is the idea associated with it in the mind of anyone who knows and understands that expression. But the ideational account of meaning, as Locke’s view is sometimes called, is vulnerable to several objections. Suppose, for example, that a person’s idea of grass is associated in his mind with the idea of warm ...(100 of 4521 words)