ABSTRACT
The most important contributions to that subject through the 1970s were Donald Davidson's elaborations of the idea of a theory of meaning for a particular language. What came to be called a Davidsonic boom had been resounding through Oxford and beyond in those years and Ways of Meaning tells what it was all about. Davidson's idea was that a speaker of a language can be said to know the conditions under which each of the indicative sentences he understands would be true. The task of what he called a theory of meaning for a particular language was then to give a systematic description of the structure of the language in a way that would yield, for each sentence, a statement of what the truth-conditions of that sentence are. Mark Platts had in mind specifically morality, and he certainly raised the question before Donald Davidson himself had discuss the issue publicly.
