The Paradox of Charity

Abstract

The principle of charity is used in philosophy of language and argumentation theory as an important principle of interpretation which credits speakers with “the best” plausible interpretation of their discourse. I contend that the argumentation account, while broadly advocated, misses the basic point of a dialectical conception which approaches argumentation as discussion between (at least) two parties who disagree over the issue discussed. Therefore, paradoxically, an analyst who is charitable to one discussion party easily becomes uncharitable to the other. To overcome this paradox, I suggest to significantly limit the application of the principle of charity depending on contextual factors.

Trust, relevance, and arguments

“…After all, readers familiar with pragmatics and philosophy of language might be experiencing a strong déjà vu at this point: disambiguating (1) and (3) requires little more than a straightforward application of Grice's maxim of relevance, whereas enthymeme reconstruction in (2) seems to be guided by a relevance-based version of the principle of charity (for critical discussion of the role of charity in enthymeme interpretation, see Lewinski, 2012;Paglieri & Woods, 2011a, 2011b. Both are old friends of any student of argumentation.…”

The Social Psychology of Everyday Politics

“…However, the activist's claim against carbon offsets rests upon characterizing them as offering "peace of mind", an obstacle against change. By doing a not very charitable interpretation of the activist's case (see Lewiński, 2012) the interviewee cuts out the confrontational elements from the activist's discourse in a way that opens up space for arguing in a conciliatory way, in favour of the use of carbon offsets.…”

Experimental ordinary language philosophy: a cross-linguistic study of defeasible default inferences

“…Austin's empirically confirmed positive point about the context-sensitivity of comprehension inferences thus seems to undercut the rationale of his critical project, and motivates the question: Exactly when (if ever) and why should competent speakers (like philosophers) make, or fall for, contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences, in formulating their arguments or problems? This question is rendered yet more pressing by the 'paradox of charity' (Lewinski 2012;cf. Adler 1994): Hermeneutic principles of charity constrain attributions of fallacies to competent thinkers.…”

“…19 The development of H 3 will illustrate, more generally, how experimental investigations into automatic cognitive processes can support the analysis of philosophical arguments and, specifically, 'diagnostic' analyses that seek to expose fallacies. The more blatant the identified fallacies are, once spelled out, the more strongly the proposed analysis violates hermeneutic principles of charity (Adler 1994;Lewinski 2012), and the more strongly it is in need of empirical validation (Thagard and Nisbett 1983). Such validation is provided by psychological explanations of when and why competent thinkers should commit the fallacies at issue (see above, Sect.…”