Principle of charity

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In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity is an approach to understanding a speaker's statements by interpreting the speaker's statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, rendering the best, strongest possible interpretation of an argument. In its narrowest sense, the goal of this methodological principle is to avoid attributing irrationality, logical fallacies or falsehoods to the statements of others, when there is another coherent, rational interpretation of the statements. According to Simon Blackburn (1994), "it constrains the interpreter to maximize the truth or rationality in the subject's sayings."

It was named in 1958–59 by Neil L. Wilson, and Willard Van Orman Quine and Donald Davidson are associated with different formulations of the principle of charity. Davidson also sometimes referred to it as the principle of rational accommodation. He summed it up as: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimises agreement. The principle may be invoked in the case of a particular logical argument or indeed to make sense of a speaker's utterances when one is unsure of their meaning; Quine's use of the principle, in particular, gives it this latter, wide domain.

Since the time of Quine et al., other philosophers have disambiguated at least four versions of the principle of charity. These four principles may potentially come into conflict with one another, so that how exactly an interpreter is charitable is partially a matter of taste. The four principles are:

The other uses words in the ordinary way;
The other makes true statements;
The other makes valid arguments;
The other says something interesting.

A supplement to the principle of charity is the principle of humanity, which states that when interpreting another speaker we must assume that his or her beliefs and desires are connected to each other and to reality in some way, and attribute to him or her "the propositional attitudes one supposes one would have oneself in those circumstances" (Daniel Dennett, "Mid-Term Examination," in The Intentional Stance, p. 343). The principle of humanity was named by Richard Grandy in 1973.

[edit] References

Blackburn, Simon (1994). "charity, principle of," The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 62.
Davidson, Donald [1974] (1984). "Ch. 13: On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.