We are now in a position – or almost in a position – to ask a key question about Davidson's philosophy of language; namely, how can we know whether a theory of meaning that meets the desiderata of Chapter 2, and is constructed along the lines set out in Chapters 3 and 4, can play the role Davidson identifies for it as part of a unified theory of interpretation? I turn to this question in §5.4. First, I need to say more about the way Davidson reconceives the concept of meaning in light of his account of interpretation; and we need to see, too, what further knowledge someone brings to bear when she employs a theory of interpretation to make sense of a speaker's utterance.

Holism and meaning

Davidson writes at one point that “to give truth conditions is a way of giving the meaning of a sentence”, but he immediately modulates his thesis as the claim that knowing a truth theory for a language “amounts, in one good sense we can give to the phrase, to understanding the language” (1984a: 24). The difference is important. Holism implies that the meaning that any one T-theorem attributes to a sentence is bound up with the semantic assignments the theory makes to other expressions of the language, and these interdependencies run deeper than the observation that to interpret “Schnee ist weiss” it might be helpful first to know the meaning of “Das ist weiss.”