Truth and Meaning

I think a puzzle for Davidson's approach is that we couldn't work out how to speak a language from a truth theory for the language on its own.  Since a truth theory for a language only allows us to distinguish true from false sentences of the language, it can only teach us what to assert and what to deny.  It is hard to see how context can get in here.

I don't mean just the kind of context that disambiguates indexicals, or gives sense to 'occasion sentences', but also the conversational context, the context that makes a certain utterance 'appropriate'.

Is there an important difference, here, between having a theory of truth for L and having a list of all the true sentences of L?  Isn't a theory of truth (as envisioned by Tarski and Davidson) just a way of generating such a list, or determining whether an arbitrary sentence is a member of it?

How would we make a transition from having such a list, or such a test, to being able to speak L?  We may not be able to give a full account of meaning in terms of use, but we can't give an account that denies its relevance.  If we don't know how to use an expression, we don't know what it means.

We can be confused by the fact that we might learn to speak French from a theory of truth for French written down in English, but we would oly be able to do this if we can, as well, transfer certain principles of appropriate use from the English context onto the French expressions that we have learned.

Even if these principles were, themselves, articulated in both English and in French, they would not be part of the hypothesised theory of truth for French.