Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation

The central claim is that a Tarskian truth theory, properly constrained, can serve as a theory of meaning for a natural language. Davidson argues that a theory of meaning must be finite, holistic, and verifiable without presupposing the very concepts of meaning it aims to explain. He rejects the view that meanings are entities—whether mental contents, Platonic propositions, or conventions—that a theory must catalogue. He also rejects the idea that alternative conceptual schemes are intelligible: if a scheme were truly incommensurable with ours, we could not recognize it as a scheme at all. The essays collectively replace the question 'What do words mean?' with 'What is it for a truth theory to interpret a speaker's utterances?'

Radical interpretation is the situation of an interpreter who must construct a theory of meaning for a speaker's language from scratch, without relying on prior knowledge of the speaker's beliefs or meanings. Because behaviour alone is the evidence, the interpreter faces a circularity: beliefs and meanings must be assigned together. Davidson's solution is the Principle of Charity—the interpreter must assume the speaker's beliefs are largely true and largely consistent by their own standards. Without this assumption, interpretation is impossible, because no independent access to beliefs exists against which meanings could be checked. Charity is not a moral virtue but a methodological necessity: it is the condition under which interpretation can get off the ground at all.

The essay argues that the notion of a conceptual scheme—a framework that organizes experience and could be fundamentally different from ours—is incoherent. Davidson's target is the relativist picture according to which different schemes organize a neutral content, whether 'reality' or 'experience.' He contends that the very idea of a scheme requires the idea of something scheme-independent to organize, and that this dualism of scheme and content cannot be made intelligible. The essay was widely read as a refutation of Kuhn and Whorf, and it generated extensive debate. Critics have argued that Davidson conflates different senses of 'scheme' and that his conclusion is too strong, but the essay remains a touchstone for discussions of relativism and incommensurability.

In 'What Metaphors Mean,' Davidson argues that metaphors mean nothing beyond their literal meaning. The standard view holds that a metaphor has a special figurative meaning, which the interpreter must decode. Davidson denies this: the words in a metaphor mean exactly what they mean literally, and the metaphor's effect—its capacity to prompt insight or notice a resemblance—is a matter of use, not meaning. There is no proposition expressed by a metaphor that could be paraphrased without loss. This view has been influential but contested: critics argue that it cannot account for the cognitive content of metaphor or for the difference between metaphor and mere nonsense. Davidson's essay shifted the debate from semantics to pragmatics, asking what speakers do with words rather than what words mean.

The first edition was published in 1984 by Clarendon Press, collecting eighteen essays written between 1965 and 1982, with very light editing and few new footnotes . The second edition, published in 2001, adds a new Introduction and a previously uncollected Appendix to Essay 10, in which Davidson replies to Quine and Lewis . A review in the Linguist List notes that the second edition also corrects misprints from the first . The essays are arranged in philosophical rather than chronological order, moving from truth and meaning through applications and radical interpretation to language, reality, and the limits of the literal. The collection is Volume 2 of Davidson's Philosophical Essays, companion to Essays on Actions and Events.

A frequent misreading assumes that Davidson simply equates truth with meaning, as if a T-sentence like 'Snow is white' is true iff snow is white were by itself a meaning statement. In fact, Davidson's claim is more subtle: a truth theory is a formal device whose theorems, when combined with the constraints of radical interpretation, can be confirmed as interpretative. Tarski's theory provides the recursive structure; the Principle of Charity and the evidence of behaviour provide the empirical constraint. Davidson later acknowledged a mistake in his early formulation, moving from the view that T-sentences need only be true to the view that they must be law-like generalizations about the speaker . The Tarskian machinery is a framework for interpretation, not a definition of meaning.