Compositional meanings, again.

Does a sentence have meaning?

Davidson seems to dispense with word meanings, but retain sentence meanings.  This is OK, if you think (as he does?) of words as affecting sentence meaning through composition rules, but not having meanings on their own.  But if we distinguish 'having a meaning' from 'having a role in generating meaning', we need to have some kind of criteria for doing this.

Clearly, for Davidson, the sentence/fact relationship won't work for this, because he accepts the relevance of the slingshot argument.

So why do sentences have meaning?  We have to be careful here:  if sentences only have meaning as individual elements in a playable language game, then they may be no better off than words or other sub-sentential elements.

But we can't think of the game as a whole as having 'a meaning'.  We can think of it as being meaningful.