Langer called this conceptual expression. “It is as a formulation of feeling for our conception that a work of art is properly said to be expressive” (1962, 89; emphasis added). Yet a work of art is not a symbol in the usual sense because it has no conventional reference, and so, she decided, cannot be properly said to have a meaning. In Ernest Nagel’s definition, for example, a symbol is “any occurrence (or type of occurrence), usually linguistic in status, which is taken to signify something else by way of tacit or explicit conventions or rules of language” (quoted in Langer 1957b, 130; emphasis added). In contrast, Langer held that a work of art does not point beyond itself to something known by other means, for what is expressed in a work of art “cannot be grasped apart from the sensuous or poetic form that expresses it” (1957b, 134).