How did Donald Davidson use Alfred Tarski’s theory of truth to explain meaning?

Donald Davidson utilized Alfred Tarski’s formal definition of truth to develop a theory of meaning for natural languages. Davidson proposed that to provide the meaning of a sentence is to specify its truth conditions—the circumstances under which the sentence would be true.123

Drawing on Tarski’s distinction between an object language and a metalanguage, Davidson argued that an adequate semantic theory must entail a "T-sentence" for every sentence in the object language. These statements take the form: “S” is true if and only if p, where S is the sentence being analyzed and p is a translation of that sentence in the metalanguage.123

By applying this framework, Davidson rendered the idea that meaning is equivalent to truth conditions into a substantive program. To address challenges regarding synonymy, he incorporated the "principle of charity," which requires interpreting a speaker’s utterances in a way that maximizes their truthfulness, thereby linking the theory of meaning to the actual circumstances in which a speaker holds a sentence to be true.1