more from this thinker     |     more from this text

Single Idea 6275

[filed under theme 19. Language / F. Communication / 6. Interpreting Language / c. Principle of charity ]

Full Idea

The maxim that 'most of a speaker's beliefs are true' as an a priori principle governing radical translation seems to me to go too far; first, I don't know how to count beliefs; second, most people's beliefs on some topics (philosophy) are probably false.

Gist of Idea

You can't say 'most speaker's beliefs are true'; in some areas this is not so, and you can't count beliefs

Source

Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three)

Book Ref

Putnam,Hilary: 'Meaning and the Moral Sciences' [RKP 1981], p.101

A Reaction

Putnam prefers a pragmatic view, where charity is applicable if behaviour is involved. Philosophy is too purely theoretical. The extent to which Charity should apply in philosophy seminars is a nice question, which all students should test in practice.

The 21 ideas with the same theme [assume people aim to speak truth]:

4144 Common human behaviour enables us to interpret an unknown language [Wittgenstein]
11049 To communicate, language needs agreement in judgment as well as definition [Wittgenstein]
6314 Weird translations are always possible, but they improve if we impose our own logic on them [Quine]
6315 We should be suspicious of a translation which implies that a people have very strange beliefs [Quine]
7330 The principle of charity only applies to the logical constants [Quine, by Miller,A]
6316 We translate in a way that makes the largest possible number of statements true [Wilson,NL]
6275 You can't say 'most speaker's beliefs are true'; in some areas this is not so, and you can't count beliefs [Putnam]
18703 Davidson's Cogito: 'I think, therefore I am generally right' [Davidson, by Button]
3971 There is simply no alternative to the 'principle of charity' in interpreting what others do [Davidson]
8869 The principle of charity attributes largely consistent logic and largely true beliefs to speakers [Davidson]
19154 The principle of charity says an interpreter must assume the logical constants [Davidson]
3403 We assume people believe the obvious logical consequences of their known beliefs [Kim]
3402 If someone says "I do and don't like x", we don't assume a contradiction [Kim]
9040 Charity should minimize inexplicable error, rather than maximising true beliefs [Evans]
15539 Basic to pragmatics is taking a message in a way that makes sense of it [Lewis]
8614 A sophisticated principle of charity sometimes imputes error as well as truth [Lewis]
8615 We need natural properties in order to motivate the principle of charity [Lewis]
2762 Charity makes native beliefs largely true, and Humanity makes them similar to ours [Dancy,J]
7328 The principle of charity is holistic, saying we must hold most of someone's system of beliefs to be true [Miller,A]
7329 Maybe we should interpret speakers as intelligible, rather than speaking truth [Miller,A]
4734 Cryptographers can recognise that something is a language, without translating it [O'Grady]