 The basic problem that radical interpretation must address is that one cannot assign meanings to a speaker’s utterances without knowing what the speaker believes, while one cannot identify beliefs without knowing what the speaker’s utterances mean. It seems that we must provide both a theory of belief and a theory of meaning at one and the same time. Davidson claims that the way to achieve this is through the application of the so-called ‘principle of charity’ (Davidson has also referred to it as the principle of ‘rational accommodation’) a version of which is also to be found in Quine. In Davidson’s work this principle, which admits of various formulations and cannot be rendered in any completely precise form, often appears in terms of the injunction to optimise agreement between ourselves and those we interpret, that is, it counsels us to interpret speakers as holding true beliefs (true by our lights at least) wherever it is plausible to do (see ‘Radical Interpretation’ [1973]). In fact the principle can be seen as combining two notions: a holistic assumption of rationality in belief (‘coherence’) and an assumption of causal relatedness between beliefs – especially perceptual beliefs – and the objects of belief (‘correspondence’) (see ‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’ [1991]). The process of interpretation turns out to depend on both aspects of the principle. Attributions of belief and assignments of meaning must be consistent with one another and with the speaker’s overall behaviour; they must also be consistent with the evidence afforded by our knowledge of the speaker’s environment, since it is the worldly causes of beliefs that must, in the ‘most basic cases’, be taken to be the objects of belief (see ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’ [1983]). Inasmuch as charity is taken to generate particular attributions of belief, so those attributions are, of course, always defeasible. The principle itself is not so, however, since it remains, on the Davidsonian account, a presupposition of any interpretation whatsoever. Charity is, in this respect, both a constraint and an enabling principle in all interpretation – it is more than just a heuristic device to be employed in the opening stages of interpretative engagement.