Considers Davidson’s claim in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’ that there is ‘no such thing as a language’ in the sense in which many philosophers and linguists have wanted to maintain. Argues that once the precise content of the claim is made clear, the claim is plausibly true in the light of Davidson’s view that the radical interpreter’s stance is basic for understanding meaning, but also that it has none of the alarming consequences which critics have supposed to flow from it, including its being incompatible with Davidson’s use of the notion of a language at other places in his work.
Keywords: convention, Dummett, malapropism, reality of language, social character of language