In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein compares a natural language, for example, English or German, to an ancient city. Our everyday speech, he says, is like the ancient town centre with its “maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods”, while more recently added idioms (e.g. a specialized scientific vocabulary), like newly constructed suburbs, are regular and predictable in their structure (Wittgenstein 1958: §18). Part of Wittgenstein's point is to stress the complex interrelatedness of different parts of a language, but the image also appeals to him for its implication that mapping a language's structure is no easier than mapping the geography of an ancient city. The merit of this comparison should be evident to anyone who has navigated the back streets of London or Boston.

Davidson is sympathetic to this analogy between finding one's way around a city and within a language, but unlike Wittgenstein (and like Frege) he is persuaded that a language must be amenable to systematic semantic analysis. In this chapter I begin to present Davidson's philosophy of language by examining those formal constraints he takes to be needed if one is going to find one's way within a language. These constraints have the effect of identifying the structure an adequate theory of meaning may take, and in Chapter 3 I focus on Davidson's appropriation of Alfred Tarski's work in the semantics of formal languages as supplying the leading candidate for this structure.