  Davidson elaborates a model of communication that takes as its paradigm “radical interpretation.” During radical interpretation, one tries to assign truth-conditions to utterances in a completely unfamiliar tongue. To do so, one detects patterns concerning which sentences the speaker “holds true,” and one tries to make rational sense of those patterns, guided by general maxims such as the  principle of charity (roughly, maximize true beliefs on the part of the speaker). Davidson admits that, in everyday life, we tend as a default to interpret one another “homophonically.” But there is no principled reason why we must embrace this homophonic default, and we readily deviate from it whenever seems appropriate, as illustrated by cases of idiosyncratic usage, malapropism, and so on. In a sense, then, all linguistic understanding rests upon radical interpretation. So shared linguistic conventions are inessential to linguistic communication: