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: 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, only noise.