What means that, traveller?

In accord with the wishes of my advisor I am reading a book about Davidson by a fellow named Someone Evnine.  I have, I assure you, ever so many delightful thoughts about it, but of the truth of the one recorded herein I am at least moderately confident.  At various places Evnine observes that there is a problem, or are problems, with attempting to give a theory of meaning using sentences of the form

s means that p

Where s is the name of a sentence in the object language and p is a sentence in the metalanguage.  And indeed, it seems to me that there is a problem with attempting to do that, but the problem is not what Evnine following Davidson brings up.  The problem is that all such sentences are false. (Maybe one should except certain divine languages, such as mystics are said to have mastered in bygone days, but I'm not even sure of that.)  How could "la neige est blanche" possibly mean that snow is white?

Not at all in accord with his wishes, or at least his explicitly stated wishes, I am also reading "Real Patterns" and "Pattern and Being", about which one can expect an utterly pettifogging post either by the end of the day tomorrow or sometime before next week today, depending on how things go on the weekend.

Comments

[mp]

they have the same truth conditions.