Abstract

Knowing what an expression means is neither knowing that it means such and such nor knowing how to do things with the expression; it is being in, or being apt to be in, a certain kind of language-processing state. The account of knowledge of meaning is seen to suggest that, strictly speaking, there are no such things as expression meanings. Whether or not that is so, there are things to which an expression must be related if it is to have meaning, and with an eye to David Kaplan’s characters, these things are called characters*. This leads to a critical discussion of two-dimensional semantics.