PUBLIC MARKS from pgiger with tag "principle of charity"

Gadamer and the Principle of Charity. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Wisconsin Philosophical Assoication, April 24, 1999 The classic statement of “the principle of charity” reads, “the more sentences we conspire to accept or reject, the better we understand the rest, whether or not we agree.” [note 1] Donald Davidson’s main point here belongs to a theory of meaning—within semantics, the truth value of a sentence is intimately connected to the truth value of other sentences, within a theory of interpretation, one can not attribute agreement or disagreement except against the background of significant agreement. The principle of charity is not, as Davidson quickly notes, a presumption of the rationality of those we are trying to understand. Rather the intuition behind the principle of charity is that if we interpret a sentence in such a way as to render it unintelligible, this is likely a sign of a poor interpretation rather than an accurate interpretation of an unintelligible view.

In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity is an approach to understanding a speaker's statements by rendering the best, strongest possible interpretation of an argument's meaning. In its narrowest sense, the goal of this methodological principle is to help keep people trying to understand or evaluate the truth of an argument from introducing a logical fallacy or other error into an argument that is not inherent to it. According to Simon Blackburn, "it constrains the interpreter to maximize the truth or rationality in the subject's sayings."