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Single Idea 7328

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

Full Idea

Properly construed, the principle of charity is a holistic constraint applying, not to individual beliefs, but rather to systems of belief: we must interpret a speaker so that most of the beliefs in his system are, by our lights, true.

Gist of Idea

The principle of charity is holistic, saying we must hold most of someone's system of beliefs to be true

Source

Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 8.7)

Book Ref

Miller,Alexander: 'Philosophy of Language' [UCL Press 1998], p.271

A Reaction

This is a lot more plausible than applying the principle to individual sentences, particularly if you are in the company of habitual ironists or constitutional liars.

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]