 On the view Davidson rejects, successful communication happens because this first meaning is shared (i.e., utterer and audience assign the same first meaning), prepared (i.e., it was available to both utterer and audience prior to the utterance) and systematic (i.e., capturable in a compositional theory). All three properties are implicit in the conventionalist supposition that expressions have their meaning specified within the social language from which they are drawn. We might conceptualize this social language as English, or instead as a convention in Lewis’s technical sense. If the latter, the claim Davidson has in his sights is that communication within a given linguistic community is made possible by a (shared, prepared, systematic) convention to be truthful and trusting in some L. Davidson denies that there is any such L.