 Davidson’s strategy is to embed the formal structure for a theory of meaning (the structure he finds in a Tarskian truth theory) within a more general theory of interpretation the broad outlines of which he draws from Quine’s discussion in Word and Object (first published in 1960). ‘Radical translation’ is intended by Quine as an idealisation of the project of translation that will exhibit that project in its purest form. Normally the task of the translator is aided by prior linguistic knowledge – either of the actual language to be translated or of some related language. Quine envisages a case in which translation of a language must proceed without any prior linguistic knowledge and solely on the basis of the observed behaviour of the speakers of the language in conjunction with observation of the basic perceptual stimulations that give rise to that behaviour. Davidson has a broader conception of the behavioural evidence available than does Quine (he allows that we may, for instance, identify speakers as having the attitude of ‘holding true’ with respect to sentences) and, in addition, rejects the Quinean insistence on a special role being given to simple perceptual stimulations. Moreover, since Davidson’s interest is more properly semantic than Quine’s (Quine sees radical translation as part of a primarily epistemological inquiry), while Davidson also views a theory of translation alone as insufficient to ensure understanding of the language it translates (the translation may be into a language we do not understand), so the notion of ‘translation’ is replaced in the Davidsonian account with that of ‘interpretation’. Radical interpretation is a matter of interpreting the linguistic behaviour of a speaker ‘from scratch’ and so without reliance on any prior knowledge either of the speaker’s beliefs or the meanings of the speaker’s utterances. It is intended to lay bare the knowledge that is required if linguistic understanding is to be possible, but it involves no claims about the possible instantiation of that knowledge in the minds of interpreters (Davidson thus makes no commitments about the underlying psychological reality of the knowledge that a theory of interpretation makes explicit). 