The Principle of Charity: is the requirement to attribute largely true beliefs a constitutive condition on interpretation or a distorting methodological prejudice that forces agreement?

Donald Davidson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The Principle of Charity is not a methodological recommendation — a useful heuristic the interpreter chooses to follow — but a constitutive condition on the possibility of interpretation.12 Any procedure for assigning truth conditions to sentences requires an anchor in observable behavioral evidence: the speaker's dispositions to hold sentences true.3

But those dispositions underdetermine which truth conditions to assign unless the interpreter assumes the speaker is by and large right about the world and reasons largely in accordance with the canons of logic.4 Without charity, no stable target for truth-condition assignment is available, and interpretation does not get started. The consequence is that massive error is impossible: not because the world obliges our beliefs, but because the conditions of belief- attribution require that most attributed beliefs be true.5

Sources

  1. Demanding that a theory of interpretation satisfy the constraints of a theory of truth means that more structure than is needed for translation must be made manifest. If we suppose, as the principle of charity says we unavoidably must, that the pattern of sentences to which a speaker assents reflects the semantics of the logical constants, it is possible to detect and interpret those constants.
    Truth and Predication, pp. 62–63
  2. As a matter of principle, then, meaning, and by its connection with meaning, belief also, are open to public determination. I shall take advantage of this fact in what follows and adopt the stance of a radical interpreter when asking about the nature of belief.
    Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp. 167–168
  3. We have no choice, Quine has urged, but to read our own logic into the thoughts of a speaker; Quine says this for the sentential calculus, and I would add the same for first-order quantification theory. This leads directly to the identification of the logical constants, as well as to the assignment of a logical form to each sentence.
    Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. 168
  4. This step in conjunction with the first limits the possibilities for interpreting individual predicates. The last step deals with the remaining sentences, those on which there is not uniform agreement, or whose held truth value does not depend systematically on changes in the environment. RADICAL INTERPRETATION 150 For more on getting a 'best fit' see Essays 10-12.
    Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp. 136–137
  5. Quine's solution resembles Ramsey's, in principle if not in detail. The crucial step in both cases is to find a way to hold one factor steady in certain situations while determining the other. Quine's key idea is that the correct interpretation of an agent by another cannot intelligibly admit certain kinds and degrees of difference between The Content of the Concept of Truth 11.
    Truth and Predication, pp. 61–62

Where the argument is made

  • 'Radical Interpretation' (1973, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, OUP 2001)
  • 'Belief and the Basis of Meaning' (1974, in Inquiries)
  • 'Thought and Talk' (1975, in Inquiries)
  • 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge' (1983, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, OUP 2001)

How the argument was received

The standard objection — that charity forces unwanted agreement, rules out radical belief-difference by fiat, imports ethnocentrism into descriptions of other cultures — mistakes the level at which the Principle operates. Charity does not prohibit attributing specific false beliefs; it requires that the total pattern of attributed beliefs be coherent and largely true. One can attribute systematic false beliefs about spirits while attributing mostly true beliefs about the physical environment, kinship, and social arrangements within which those spirit-beliefs are formed. Fodor and Lepore's holism objection — that holism makes the meaning-belief package globally unstable — is the serious technical challenge; the response is that indeterminacy of interpretation is a feature of the account that the Celsius-Fahrenheit analogy is meant to illuminate, not a concession to the objection.