ABSTRACT
The author traces Donald Davidson's treatment of skepticism about the external world to its sources. This will help people to appreciate how he can be regarded as addressing it in different ways at different stages of the development of his views about meaning. And it will help people better to understand why some commentators do not take his final answer for what it is. Barry Stroud is one of the most formidable challengers of the anti-skeptical claims that Davidson contends follow from the triangulation argument. According to Stroud, all that Davidson has established is a claim about belief-attribution, namely, that it is largely truth-ascribing. Moreover, Stroud continues, the stronger claim would not imply that anyone knows or has any good reason to believe anything about the world. Even if it were the case that most of people's beliefs about the world are true, they might still lack any good reason to believe this.
