According to Davidson, the ability to interpret is central to thinking. This is because thinking is necessary for speaking and for a person having the concept of belief implies that he must be an interpreter and to be an interpreter means he must be a member of a speech community. Further, he says that for a being to have a thought implies that he/she must have a system of beliefs. The justification for it is that a particular thought is defined only in relation to a system of beliefs within which it has its own place. In this regard, Davidson has given an example which is as follows, "in order to think whether the gun is loaded requires the belief that a gun is a weapon that is a more or less enduring physical object, and so on."¹⁰ These are the beliefs forming a system that 'identifies a thought by locating it in a logical and epistemic space'.¹¹

Through this analysis Davidson ultimately reveals his hidden agenda expressing his faith that beliefs are socially shared and it is only through a common language that we come to know those beliefs. For him, beliefs are not formed in private experiences of the individual nor are there anything called pre-social and pre-linguistic self of the individual. Thus, he defines belief as essentially a social perspective where one can have thoughts only by interpreting the speech of the other. Adding to it, he states that the ability to interpret is the ground for acquiring knowledge; knowledge of how things are in the world.

In this regard, Davidson states that investigation of the nature of thought and investigation of the nature of language are one and the same. But it is noticed that there are differences found between what X says and what X thinks. Hence, the radical translation is impossible from one language to another because of the improper and inaccurate translation. In this respect, he says that radical interpretation must start from "evidence that can be stated without essential use of such linguistic concepts as meaning, interpretation, synonymy and the like."¹² In case of radical interpretation, he further asserts that to say that 'S means that P' is to say that S belongs to a language for which an empirically acceptable calculus of truth conditions delivers 'S is true iff P' as a theorem.¹³ Thus, the theorem that leads to the speaker of the language must satisfy the principle of charity.

For Davidson, to determine the meanings of utterances of a speaker we not only hold the charity principle and belief system but also the theory of radical interpretation. These three principles together assist us to understand the speakers' utterances and guide us to relate to the conditions where the sentences will be treated as true or false. Thus, according to Davidson, every sentence can be judged as either true or false. To claim a sentence is true or false depends on its material adequacy condition and formal condition of T-sentence. T-sentence as such is not free from the problems of determining the meaning of a proposition. The problem lies with T-sentence when the object language does not match with the meta-language, i.e., a mismatch between what the sentence expresses and what it refers to. Davidson calls this problem as 'extensional problem'.

¹⁰	This example is taken from Davidson, D. (1984). Thought and Talk. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, P.157.
¹¹	Ibid.
¹²	Ibid, p.128.
¹³	This is enunciated by Hale, J. (2000). Radical Interpretation. In B. Hale and C.Wright (Eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. UK: Blackwell, P.181.