View source for Principle of Charity

'''The principle of charity''' is the methodological assumption that an interpreter must attribute to her subject predominantly rational beliefs, coherent desires, and true statements about the world — not because people are actually perfectly rational, but because interpretation is impossible without this presupposition. The principle was formulated by [[Donald Davidson]] as the epistemic engine that drives [[Radical Interpretation|radical interpretation]]: without charity, any set of utterances can be mapped onto any set of meanings, and no theory of the speaker's language can get off the ground.

Charity is not a moral injunction to be nice. It is a constraint on what counts as a ''successful'' interpretation. An interpretation that attributes massive error and inconsistency to the speaker fails not because it is unkind but because it is uninformative — it fails to explain why the speaker's behavior is patterned and predictable. The principle therefore guarantees that successful interpretation presupposes a shared world: the interpreter and the speaker cannot be living in incommensurable realities if they can understand each other at all.

The principle has been criticized as culturally parochial — what counts as 'rational' may itself be contested. But defenders argue that charity is not the imposition of a specific rationality but the minimal condition of interpretability itself. Without it, there is no [[Semantics|semantics]], only noise.

[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category:Language]]