That the meaning of a philosophical text has little or nothing to do with the truth of its propositions is a central dogma of intellectual history, in both its contextualist and hermeneutic guises. Bracketing truth claims is what allows the intellectual historian to argue for the meaning of a philosophical text, either by situating it in a discursive milieu that endows it with historical intelligibility or instead by attending to those gestures by which the text and its reader assign it a place in a perennial philosophical dialogue. A shared presumption of these forms of inquiry is that to concern oneself with the truth of a philosophical text would amount to simply doing philosophy, and that an intellectual historian concerned with such matters is engaged in a category mistake. But is it plausible that an account of a philosophical text’s meaning can be indifferent to its truth? This paper will consider in what ways the truth-conditional semantics developed by the American philosopher Donald Davidson (1917-2003) sheds light on what it is intellectual historians are doing when they debate the meaning of philosophical texts. Davidson famously extrapolated a theory of semantics from formal languages and applied it to natural language in order to argue that any grasp of meaning, far from bracketing its relation to truth, presumes it. The ‘radical interpretation’ that Davidson posited at the heart of all communication has been deemed foreign to historical understanding by authors averse to the rationalism of his project. This paper considers the opposing view, namely, that such rationalism is a necessary prerequisite to any objective – and hence contestable – claim about the past.