"The Philosophy-Linguistics Connection" by Donald Davidson ,1967

Ideas about semantics and logical form fit with what what was going on at the time in linguistics. Davidson’s ideas of the time were expressed in such papers as
“Truth and Meaning,”
“The Logical Form of Action Sentences,”
“Causal Relations,”
and “On Saying That.”
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One part of his view was a stress on the importance for semantics of providing a theory of truth conditions. In a way he was defending a version of Quine’s translational approach to meaning: your semantics for a language L should provide a systemic way to translate from L into your own language, but with some additional restrictions. The system of translation should take the form of a theory of truth for the other language; it should have a finite number of axioms (because it has to be learnable); and it should be expressed in first-order quantification theory. The use of second-order quantification or substitutional quantification is ruled out in part because it trivializes the requirement that the rules of translation should take the form of a theory of truth. Appeal to possible worlds is ruled out as well, for reasons that are less clear to me.
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Like many other philosophers at the time, I was completely unconvinced by Davidson’s meta-view about the connection between truth and meaning. On the other hand I was (also like many others) rather taken with Davidson’s particular accounts of logical form, for example, his suggestion that some sorts of adverbial modification were best treated by supposing that certain sentences involve hidden quantifications over events, that the verbs in such sentences are predicates of events, and that the adverbs represent further predicates of time, place, manner, etc.; or his claim that causal statements are often statements of causal relations between events; or his proposal that sentential that clause complements, as in “Galileo said that the Earth is flat” be treated as performances that the rest of the sentence comments on.

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The Structure of a Semantic Theory
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Although Davidson has written on a wide range of topics, a great deal of his work, particularly during the late 1960s and early 1970s, has focussed on the problem of developing an approach to the theory of meaning that will be adequate to natural language. The characteristic feature of Davidson's approach to this problem is his proposal that meaning is best understood via the concept of truth, and, more particularly, that the basic structure for any adequate theory of meaning is that given in a formal theory of truth.

Davidson's thinking about semantic theory is developed on the basis of a holistic conception of linguistic understanding (see ‘Truth and Meaning’ [1967c]). Providing a theory of meaning for a language is thus a matter of developing a theory that will enable us to generate, for every actual and potential sentence of the language in question, a theorem that specifies what each sentence means. On this basis a theory of meaning for German that was given in English might be expected to generate theorems that would explicate the German sentence ‘Schnee ist weiss’ as meaning that snow is white. Since the number of potential sentences in any natural language is infinite, a theory of meaning for a language that is to be of use to creatures with finite powers such as ourselves, must be a theory that can generate an infinity of theorems (one for each sentence) on the basis of a finite set of axioms. Indeed, any language that is to be learnable by creatures such as ourselves must possess a structure that is amenable to such an approach. Consequently, the commitment to holism also entails a commitment to a compositional approach according to which the meanings of sentences are seen to depend upon the meanings of their parts, that is, upon the meanings of the words that form the finite base of the language and out of which sentences are composed. Compositionality does not compromise holism, since not only does it follow from it, but, on the Davidsonian approach, it is only as they play a role in whole sentences that individual words can be viewed as meaningful. It is sentences, and not words, that are thus the primary focus for a Davidsonian theory of meaning. Developing a theory for a language is a matter of developing a systematic account of the finite structure of the language that enables the user of the theory to understand any and every sentence of the language.

A Davidsonian theory of meaning explicates the meanings of expressions holistically through the interconnection that obtains among expressions within the structure of the language as a whole. Consequently, although it is indeed a theory of meaning, a theory of the sort Davidson proposes will have no use for a concept of meaning understood as some discrete entity (whether a determinate mental state or an abstract ‘idea’) to which meaningful expressions refer. One important implication of this is that the theorems that are generated by such a theory of meaning cannot be understood as theorems that relate expressions and ‘meanings’. Instead such theorems will relate sentences to other sentences. More particularly, they will relate sentences in the language to which the theory applies (the ‘object-language’) to sentences in the language in which the theory of meaning is itself couched (the ‘meta-language’) in such a way that the latter effectively ‘give the meanings of’ or translate the former. It might be thought that the way to arrive at theorems of this sort is to take as the general form of such theorems ‘s means that p’ where s names an object-language sentence and p is a sentence in the meta-language. But this would be already to assume that we could give a formal account of the connecting phrase ‘means that’, and not only does this seem unlikely, but it also appears to assume a concept of meaning when it is precisely that concept (at least as it applies within a particular language) that the theory aims to elucidate. It is at this point that Davidson turns to the concept of truth. Truth, he argues, is a less opaque concept than that of meaning. Moreover, to specify the conditions under which a sentence is true is also a way of specifying the meaning of a sentence. Thus, instead of ‘s means that p’, Davidson proposes, as the model for theorems of an adequate theory of meaning, ‘s is true if and only if p’ (the use of the biconditional ‘if and only if’ is crucial here as it ensures the truth-functional equivalence of the sentences s and p, that is, it ensures they will have identical truth-values). The theorems of a Davidsonian theory of meaning for German couched in English would thus take the form of sentences such as “‘Schnee ist weiss’ is true if and only if snow is white.”