ABSTRACT
As a model of the way in which truth conditions can be assigned to sentences of natural languages such as English, Donald Davidson takes the way in which truth is defined for an artificial system of formal logic. Davidson begins with two ideas that prove to be related. One is that a theory of meaning should afford guidance on what determines the meaning of a particular sentence. The other is that of giving central importance to the wondrous phenomenon: the author's ability to understand long novel sentences in a flash. Davidson contends that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its constituent words. A syntax or grammar for a language, natural or artificial, is a device for sorting well-formed or grammatical sentences from among all the strings made up of words from that language. A Davidsonian truth definition has a hard time distinguishing expressions that happen to coextend but without being mutually synonymous.
