Donald Davidson has notoriously retorted that the resources of existing natural languages seem perfectly adequate for dealing with even the most dramatic cases of purported incommensurability reported by writers like Benjamin Whorf and Thomas Kuhn. But Davidson’s argument seems questionable in itself, relying as it does on such a strict application of the verification principle in order to rule out the idea of alternative conceptual schemes. Furthermore, Davidson’s scepticism is insufficient to undermine the sense in which I am defending anything resembling a thesis of incommensurability. I am merely contending that it will always be a mistake for an historian to assume that the task of explicating an alien concept can be reduced to that of finding a counterpart in his or her own language for the term that expresses it.