  Mary and John utter the same unambiguous sentence, yet they say different things, for Mary says that she is a philosopher whereas John says that he is a philosopher. Moreover, we can imagine that Mary is a philosopher and John is not, so what Mary says is true whereas what John says is false. In view of these considerations, Kaplan (1989a) proposes a distinction between two kinds of meaning, character and content. The sentence ‘I am a philosopher’ has a single character, but has different contents with respect to different contexts. Kaplan usually identifies character with linguistic meaning, which is a kind of meaning fixed by linguistic convention.