 Davidson’s denial of rule-based conventions as having a founding role in linguistic understanding, together with his emphasis on the way in which the capacity for linguistic understanding must be seen as part as part of a more general set of capacities for getting on in the world, underlie Davidson’s much-discussed account of metaphor and related features of language (see ‘What Metaphors Mean’ [1978b]). Davidson rejects the idea that metaphorical language can be explained by reference to any set of rules that govern such meaning. Instead it depends on using sentences with their ‘literal’ or standard meanings in ways that give rise to new or unexpected insights – and just as there are no rules by which we can work out what a speaker means when she utters an ungrammatical sentence, makes a pun or otherwise uses language in a way that diverges from the norm, so there are no rules that govern the grasp of metaphor.