The truth conditional approach to language plays a vital role when we attempt to explore what the theory of meaning is about. It is stated that to know the meaning of a sentence means to know its truth-value, i.e., under what conditions the sentence will be treated as true and false. Hence, knowing the meaning of a sentence implies understanding the sentence. Supporting this view Davidson explains that each proposition can be treated as either true or false because each proposition has a specific sense and it is intrinsically related to the state of affairs of the world. If the sense of a proposition maps the state of affairs of the world then the proposition will be judged as true and if it does not, then the proposition will be treated as false.

On the view of Davidson, theory of meaning can be treated same as theory of understanding. The reason that he gives is that to understand a proposition we must know what it states about. That explains how the nature of meaning and the facts of the world or the states of affairs existing in the world are closely connected. This may be explained in detail if we analyze the following issues.

1. How do we understand a sentence?
2. How do we know what the sentence is about?
3. What makes communication possible?
4. What is it for a word or expression to be meaningful?
5. How do the meanings of the complex expressions in a language depend upon their parts?

In relation to the above issues, Davidson incorporates a few other conditions. They are:

1. How can a theory of truth provide us a theory of meaning?
2. How does a theory of truth yield interpretations of statements?
3. What is it required for a theory to be empirically verifiable?

All these issues revolve around a vital and significant inquiry, i.e., 'what is a theory of meaning and how it is related to truth-value?' Attempting to answer this query Davidson delineates that the task of constructing a theory which gives the extension of the truth predicate of a language implies the task of showing how from a finite number of axioms and procedural rules we can deduce the infinite number of theorems that give the truth conditions for the sentence of a language.¹ From this, a question may be raised: "what it is for a sentence to be true?" Responding to this question, Quine says, if we equate meaning with empirical content and insist that only theories as a whole have empirical content then sentences have meanings only as parts of a body of a theory. In such a body it is possible to systematically tamper with the roles assigned to its parts in ways that leave the empirical content of the theory as a whole unaltered.² In this context, he argues that it is not possible to fix the meaning of any individual sentence by referring to our experiences.

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1	Please see Davidson, D. (1984). Radical Interpretation. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.125-139.
2	This concept has been borrowed from Quine, W.V. (1960). Word and Object. Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press.