Historians of various stripes have expressed an aversion to Davidson’s philosophy and the notion that it might be pertinent to their craft. In particular, it is claimed that Davidson’s rationalistic conception of truth is a barrier to genuine historical understanding because it submits such understanding to anachronistic standards. Such an aversion is suggestive in that it points to a discomfort with the idea that there is something that qualitatively distinguishes historical truth claims from other kinds of truth claims. Put differently, why consider Davidson’s pertinence at all if his ideas don’t present a cogent challenge to certain methodological principles in the discipline? The assessment of Davidson’s relevance began in earnest in the 1990s, when philosophers and historical theorists began staging encounters between Davidson’s work and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which also suggested that our prejudices, far from being inimical to our capacity for objectivity, are part and parcel of it. Davidson and Gadamer themselves even engaged in a brief exchange over the function of dialogue in Plato’s Philebus, a work which had been the focus of their respective doctoral dissertations decades prior. Commentators on the exchange seem uniformly to favor Gadamer’s perspective and are often smug about the ways in which Davidson apparently misunderstands Gadamer. This seems significant. This paper will take an opposite tack and argue that, whereas Gadamer’s ontological conception of truth tends to obscure political disagreement by recasting it as a matter of misunderstanding, Davidson’s semantic conception sharpens our perspective on such matters. The upshot is that developing a historical interpretation is not a case of transcending one’s political judgments but of forming them.