Interpretation and Skill: On Passing Theory David Simpson G. Preyer, G. Peter, & M. Ulkan (eds), Concepts of Meaning: Framing an Integrated Theory of Linguistic Behavior (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003): 251-266. 1. Introduction In this paper I want to explore Donald Davidson’s rejection of the use of the concept of language, when the knowledge of a language is taken as a sufficient and/or necessary condition for communicative understanding. After sketching the original presentation of the argument, I will then look at what I take to be the major weakness of that version – the argument against language as a necessary condition – and at Davidson’s more recent attempts to shore up the story in that area by way of the ‘triangulation’ thesis. After criticising that attempt, I will try to show that Davidson’s general thesis can be maintained if it incorporates an account which analyses the process – a dialectic of physiological development and nurture – by which pre-communicative beings are brought to communicative competence, without the need for the concept of a language. 2. Language as a Form of Life I think that we best approach the theory of communication and meaning by applying to it a certain non-reductive naturalism. That is, we should treat the communicative dimension of persons as a fundamentally embodied feature of socialised beings, and (in my preferred reading of the phrase) regard language as a form of life. In my view, while intentional phenomena, including therefore interpretation and communication, are not to be reduced to the physical, intentionality nevertheless rests and depends on a non-intentional background, which is itself what we might call nurtured physiology, or a trained body. The background of intentionality is able to be brought to intentionality – but this is only in a manner of speaking a matter of exposing something of which we are not aware. It is better seen as a matter of imposing intentional structure on the non- intentional, or of background taking on intentional structure. The background is not propositional in form, and should not be seen as implicit belief. We need to conceive