Topics Ethics

Question What justifies adherence to the "principle of charity"? Are we trying to be nice? Is fecundity our aim? Is there reason to suppose that the strongest arguments tend to be those most authors actually intend?

Accepted:
March 2, 2011

Comments

I think the principle of charity is useful for at least two reasons. First, if you are objecting to an argument and you present it as strongly as possible, no one (including the author of the target argument) can complain that you have attacked a straw man. If you defeat the strongest version of the argument, presumably you've wiped out any weaker versions with it. Second, if you're able to develop an even stronger version of the argument than the author herself, you have made progress, especially if you are then able to raise objections to that stronger version.

I tell my students that their goal in writing philosophy papers is to take the debate up the staircase towards Truth (or towards the best "normative" answer to a difficult question), and the way to do that is start with some position in the debate and the argument for it, present it as strongly as possible (using principle of charity), develop an objection to it, and then develop a response to the objection (principle of charity ramped up a notch!) and perhaps develop a response to that response. So, you end up either three or four steps higher than--closer to the best position than--the original position. You might say that this process mirrors the way the history of philosophy (or science) works. You might also say that, even if their is not top to the staircase, we can still believe that their is an up and down direction, and our goal is to go up, UP!

I wanted to make some remarks on the principle of charity that go in a different direction from Eddy's answer to the question.

The principle of charity admits of different interpretations: it can be understood--as Eddy seems to understand it--as enjoining one to make as much sense as possible of the words of another, and to give those words the strongest possible interpretation; it can also be understood--as Davidson, for one, seems to understand it--as a principle of rational accommodation, according to which the words of another are understood so as to maximize agreement.

One problem with both formulations of the principle of charity, which is especially manifest in the second formulation, is that adherence to the principle of charity may lead one to attribute a meaning to the words of another that yields propositions that fail to capture the propositions that one's interlocutor was trying to express. Adherence to the principle of charity when doing work in the history of philosophy, for example, could therefore result in turning figures into mirror images of ourselves, which would effectively deprive the work of interpretation of its historical dimension (and, I would add, also of its philosophical dimension, but explaining my reasons for making this claim would take us too far afield.) So although I have no quarrel with Eddy's presentation of the principle of charity, and with his explanation of its significance, especially in a teaching context, I think that adherence to it can be problematic: far from leading to understanding, following the principle of charity can actually block us from understanding what another means in his or her own terms.

Question What justifies adherence to the "principle of charity"? Are we trying to be nice? Is fecundity our aim? Is there reason to suppose that the strongest arguments tend to be those most authors actually intend? Accepted:March 2, 2011

Question What justifies adherence to the "principle of charity"? Are we trying to be nice? Is fecundity our aim? Is there reason to suppose that the strongest arguments tend to be those most authors actually intend?

Accepted:
March 2, 2011