 Donald Davidson’s instrumentalist views on reference are in some sense more radical still. Davidson (1984) claims that reference is a theoretically vacuous notion: it is of absolutely no use in a semantic theory, or a theory of strict and literal meaning. His basis for endorsing this position is his conviction that no substantive explanation of reference is possible. The problem is that any such explanation would have to be given in non-linguistic terms, but no such explanation can be given, Davidson claims. As Davidson puts it: if the name ‘Kilimanjaro’ refers to Kilimanjaro, then no doubt there is some relation between English (or Swahili) speakers, the word, and the mountain. But it is inconceivable that one should be able to explain this relation without first explaining the role of the words in the sentences; and if this is so, there is no chance of explaining reference directly in non-linguistic terms. However, this does not mean that there is no hope for semantics. On the contrary, on Davidson’s view, a theory of truth for a language is at the same time a theory of meaning for that language. The point here is that a Davidsonian theory of meaning has no place for the notion of reference per se; instead, it assimilates what we might be tempted to call ‘reference’ into the theory of linguistic truth. That might, however, prove compatible with the sorts of pluralist approaches to reference we canvassed above.