The central task of the philosophy of language is to illuminate or explain the concept of meaning as it applies to language. One way in which we might do this is to reflect on and possibly offer an analysis of our concept of linguistic meaning. Another is to reflect on our use of the term “meaning” in application to linguistic items. Dummett's recommendation (and he takes himself to be following Davidson here) is that we do best to examine the concept by trying to get clear about the form that a theory of meaning for a particular language, a meaning-theory, should take. We'll need to probe in much more detail Dummett's ideas about the nature of a meaning-theory. However, for the moment, let's characterize a theory in terms of what it should achieve. A theory of meaning for a particular language will provide the means systematically to generate specifications (or characterizations) of the meaning of each expression in the language. Our only model of how such specifications might be systematically generated as part of a theory is to conceive of the theory as a deductively connected set of propositions; axioms will provide the basis of the process of generation and the specifications will emerge as theorems of the theory. In other words, we shall have a basic set of truths about the language, truths which capture the meanings of primitive expressions and which explain how the meanings of complex expressions depend upon the meanings of their components.