Rethinking the "Principle of Charity"

Remember when I said sometimes I might have to modify or even refute previous notions or beliefs I avowed? Well, if you don't, here's your chance to see it in action. I'm trying to stay afloat on Neurath's boat baby! I will warn people in advance that this may come off as totally trivial or pedantic to you. If so, enjoy some of my other recent posts below. Or go to my archives or web links.

In any case, some of you may have seen me evoke the so-called principle of charity: being charitable in translating other's utterances when you're unsure of their meaning, on several occasions in this blog. I thought this was a bedrock, epistemic principle of preserving rationality in other's arguments. However, after a recent lecture in my proseminar on cognitive science, I have taken this principle to be quite dubious. Don't get me wrong; there's nothing wrong about being fair to other people's views, but the principle of charity asserts something much more contentious.

First mentioned by Neil L. Wilson, the principle was given fame by the likes of philosophers W.V. Quine and Donald Davidson in somewhat different formulations. Not being one of his strongest arguments, Quine being a radical behaviorist (the position that only directly, observable behavior [or dispositions to behave] could be studied scientifically), used this principle as a heuristic device for people to translate each other. Or in his classical example, to translate the utterances of some natives who speak a different language that shouted, "Gavagi!" Anyway, Quine was a skeptic of meaning. So the soundness (or lack thereof) of his arguments had strong implications for psychology, since without meaning we didn't have representations, concepts, propositions, and the like. In short, without meaning, we didn't have cognitive psychology – the main research program of scientific psychology today.

Nowadays, behaviorism has been scraped as the paradigm of psychological research because it ultimately failed; (ironically) largely through its increasingly accurate measurements of behavior that couldn't be accounted for by simply behavioristic explanations (e.g., spatial navigation in rats, the flight of honeybees, or language learning in humans). To be fair to behaviorists though, where else can you start in a science of the mind, but by studying behavior? Indeed, the error is to assume that mental phenomena cannot be studied by virtue of observable behavior or dispositions, and/or ex hypothesi all that exists is observable behavior and dispositions, not any of the intentional kind. But I digressed.

According to Quine (if I understand him correctly), we don't actually capture any meaning by the principle of charity; but our analytical hypotheses (i.e., arbitrary stipulations), gives us an "air" of determinacy to other's translations. Yet, if you think that claiming that other people don’t express any meaning in any of their sentences and words they utter; or that normally we can't know what they actually mean if they do so is weird – then bingo, you win! Nevertheless, being a behaviorist, Quine would acknowledge there is a "stimulus meaning," which is merely your degree of assention or dissention (saying "yes" or "no") to some stimulus, but that's about it. (For sake of brevity, I won't go into an expository of his view on observation sentences – which is the closest he will allow for there being some objectivity in translation.)

So yeah, as the principle of charity stands, it appears dubious because we don't actually use it in translation; and it's rather vague what someone means by the term 'rationality' that is presupposed by the so-called principle. Admittedly, I throw around the term 'rationality' a lot in this blog. But I use it in the sense that Georges Rey asserts is the property of a propositional attitude by virtue of holding certain kinds of relations to evidence, other propositional attitudes and action – which, is what Quine wants to deny in using the principle of charity. (After all, these attitudes would imply intentionality.) However, that doesn't necessarily change the fact that these are still fuzzy terms, and presupposing, I (or any one else for that matter) actually have clear and distinct meanings of these terms when envoking the principle of charity, or other equally dubious epistemic notions, is tendentious.


~AP