7 A New Approach to Charity

The principle of charity is often cited in textbooks and elsewhere. My latest survey suggests that it is cited as a strong principle, not the moderate one supported here. Many authors urge, just as Scriven did decades ago, that one should make an argument mean ‘something that a sensible person would have been likely to mean’; in other words, one should render a person’s proffered argument as rational as possible. That means selecting and interpreting the premises so that they are true or as plausible as possible, and interpreting the inferences so as to give support to the conclusion. The same presumptions are made by persons who advocate steelmanning. In philosophical circles, advice to be charitable is often tempered in textbooks and academic papers by reminders that while employing a principle of charity one must at the same time be accurate and faithful to what an arguer has actually said. Clearly these two admonitions may conflict. I sense little attention of late to that problem and scant advice as to what to do when there is such a conflict.

The problem that the otherness of other arguers may disappear under the mantle of charity, noted here, has subsequently been discussed and named ‘the problem of cultural imperialism.’ It is agreed that if otherness is made to disappear, that is a problem. Evaluating an argument, one should not interpret others, and especially not others from foreign cultures or different subcultures, as claiming just what one would claim oneself. Making them out to be what we would regard as rational or sensible, or what we would understand to be true statements about the world, risks doing just that. The risk has been acknowledged and defenders of charity in some form or other maintain that it need not go that far.

The Principle of Charity states a norm for interpretation. That norm has often been couched in ethical terms (‘be fair’) or prudential terms (‘you might have to do all your work over again if the argument you criticize can be easily amended so as to be better’). Jonathan Adler (1995) urged that the norm of charity should be regarded as an epistemic norm, based in the desire to evaluate an argument in order to discover whether the conclusion of that was true. That view, he said, was epistemic: presumably one’s goal was that of knowledge — to find out the truth of the conclusion. In other words, Adler took a position close to that of Charmides in the previous chapter. In friendly discussions with Adler, I took a position closer to that of Lysis, urging that the Charmides position risked seeing a person’s argument as merely a kind of launching pad on a road to discovering whether various premises were true and inferences correct. In his 1995 article “Charity, Interpretation, Fallacy,” Adler approved of the Gricean base used here; charity is understood not as based on norms of ethics or prudence but rather as grounded on the purpose of argumentative discourse. That is to state a claim and provide reasons for it; presumably the arguer states a claim that she regards as true or plausible and states support that she regards as strong or conclusive. Adler took the position that a principle of charity, even a fairly strong one, would not be strong enough to eliminate fallacies. That work appeared after this chapter; nevertheless I now feel that I should have given more attention to the prospect of epistemic norms to rationalize a principle of charity. For me, though, that would still be moderate charity as distinct from strong charity.

Typically, human behavior is interpreted on the assumption of rationality. To understand why someone acted as he did we try to comprehend what his reasons might be. To understand why someone said what he did, we try to comprehend what information he would be trying to communicate. To understand how someone is reasoning, we try to see a line of thought that would be coherent and logical. Charity directs us to adopt that interpretation of human behavior according to which it makes the most ‘sense’. Principles of charity have been proposed for the interpretation of action and discourse and the interpretation of arguments in particular. Charity as a principle of argument interpretation may owe part of its acceptance to the prominence of interpretative charity in other explanatory contexts.

1. Background

The principle of charity was introduced by Neil Wilson in an article about reference that appeared in the Review of Metaphysics in 1959. Wilson recommended the following rule for translators:

We select as designatum that individual which will make the largest possible number of statements true.1

That is, we assume that others aim to tell the truth. If, by interpreting others who use ‘x’ to refer to rabbits rather than mammals we can make more sense out of what they say in the sense that more of their statements turn out to be true, it is that interpretation which is correct.

Quine, following Wilson, endorsed charity for what he called radical translation. Suppose we are dealing with an unfamiliar tribe and do not understand its customs and practices when we begin the task of translation. There are always alternative ways of interpreting discourse and actions. Quine recommended that ‘assertions startlingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of language’, adding that:

… one’s interlocutor’s silliness, beyond a certain point, is less likely than bad translation or, in the domestic case, linguistic divergence… the more absurd or exotic the beliefs imputed to a people, the more suspicious we are entitled to be of the translation; the myth of the prelogical people marks only the extreme. For translation theory, banal messages are the breath of life.2

Among various tenable translation hypotheses, we opt for those that will make the logical and empirical beliefs of the tribe the most sensible and coherent.

Quine assimilates radical translation to understanding in our own culture. He sees it as an extreme case of what must go on all the time in ordinary life and ordinary language. In general, we interpret people’s comments so as to make them out to be saying something that makes sense to us. This procedure could be seen as the application of a kind of translation principle to our own language. Within our own tribe, we translate the remarks of a fellow native who uses our own language.

Must we equate our neighbor’s English words with the same strings of phonemes in our own mouths? Certainly not, for sometimes we do not thus equate them. Sometimes we find it to be in the interests of communication to recognize that our neighbor’s use of some word, such as ‘cool’ or ‘square’ or ‘hopefully’, differs from ours, and so we translate that word of his into a different string of phonemes in our idiolect … we are always prepared to temper homophony with what Neil Wilson has called ‘the principle of charity.’ We will construe a neighbor’s word heterophonically now and again if thereby we see our way to making his message less absurd…The problem at home differs none from radical translation ordinarily so called except in the wilfulness of this suspension of homophonic translation.3

Quine’s ideas were further developed by Donald Davidson, who employed a principle of charity to dispute the claim that different conceptual schemes can be used to differently catalogue the same reality.

I suggest, following Quine, that we may without circularity or unwarranted assumptions accept certain very general attitudes towards sentences as the basic evidence for a theory of radical interpretation. For the sake of the present discussion at least we may depend on the attitude of accepting as true, directed at sentences, as the crucial notion. Since charity is not an option, but a condition of having a workable theory, it is meaningless to suggest that we might fall into massive error by endorsing it. Until we have successfully established a systematic correlation of sentences held true with sentences held true, there are no mistakes to make. Charity is forced upon us: whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters. If we can produce a theory that reconciles charity and the formal conditions for a theory, we have done all that could be done to ensure communication. Nothing more is possible and nothing more is needed. We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement (this includes room, as we said, for explicable error, i.e. differences of opinion).4

This is a very strong principle of charity. Davidson requires that, in order to understand others, we must ‘count them right in most matters’, saying we make ‘maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way which optimizes agreement’. Thus, the principle Davidson defends will only rarely permit us to attribute to others faulty beliefs or reasoning, and then only when all other feasible interpretations have failed. Notably, Davidson is claiming that charity in this very strong sense is not even optional. We do not choose whether or not to be this charitable, because such a policy is a condition of having any workable theory.

Both Quine and Davidson move quickly from a radical exotic context where little background knowledge may be assumed to the domestic context. In the domestic context, the other minds sceptic would tell us we can assume little. But there are few such people: other minds scepticism has not been in fashion for many decades. It is not likely that Quine and Davidson wished to pose a full-blown problem of other minds and use a principle of charity to solve it. What is at work may be a lingering positivism: positing meanings, intentions, and purposes requires special justification.

Commentators on Quine and Davidson have not been inclined to dispute the argumentative jump from foreign tribes to friends and colleagues in our own native culture. And yet the domestic tribe and the foreign tribe are too readily assimilated. There are surely vast differences here. If we cannot assume that we understand the significance of such gestures as smiles and waves in our own culture, that most of the time people use the word ‘dog’ to refer to canines, that others are friends with whom we have had previous contact, and so on, then in understanding discourse, we are as anthropologists approaching a foreign tribe. But since we do and must assume these things in order to live and function in our own culture, our position is quite different. As Wittgenstein emphasized in On Certainty, were our position not different, we could not survive and live together.

An account can build up a spectrum of cases of varying degrees of difficulty in understanding, such that the foreign tribe is at one end of the spectrum and close individuals in our own ‘tribe’ are at the other. Thus, we might move, in theory, from my difficulty in understanding the foreign words of a Zulu chieftain, to my trouble understanding the words of an English microbiologist, to my problems understanding the words of a Canadian child, and in understanding the words of my own close Canadian friends. There are differences of degree from the hardest to the easiest cases.

Quine’s assimilation of foreign and domestic translation problems may have been tempting to his philosophical audience; we can easily construct this spectrum of cases, and the cases so arranged differ from each other by degrees. However, it is a well-known fallacy to infer from such facts that all cases on a spectrum are the same.5 Differences of degree can accumulate to make significant differences—as when a person gaining an ounce a day eventually gains one hundred pounds. The difference between interpretive problems with foreign tribes and interpretive problems that arise within our own culture are real and significant in practice. The latter should not be assimilated to the former.

As well as radical and radical-domestic translation, the presumption of rationality has been applied in recent philosophy of mind. Daniel Dennett has a concept of intentional systems that requires extremely strong charity. Dennett defines intentional systems as systems in which predictions of behavior using intentional language (the language of desires and beliefs) are effective. (There is no necessary link, on his view, between being an intentional system and being conscious; nor does being an intentional system require any specific physical structure or type of physical structure.) Dennett uses the concept of intentional systems to work out a non-dualistic position on the mind-body problem. He makes a strong presumption of rationality a condition of adopting the intentional stance. For intentional systems, we are committed to strongly charitable interpretation. According to Dennett, if we fail to interpret such systems in this way, we must altogether renounce the intentional interpretation and adopt a physicalistic approach. Dennett says:

There is a third stance one can adopt toward a system, and that is the intentional stance. This tends to be the most appropriate when the system one is dealing with is too complex to be dealt with effectively from the other stances. In the case of a chess playing computer one adopts this stance when one tries to predict its response to one’s move by figuring out what a good or reasonable response would be, given the information the computer has about the situation. Here one assumes not just the absence of malfunction, but the rationality of the design or programming as well.6

On Dennett’s account, to describe and predict the behavior of any entity that is an intentional system requires a theory of rationality, because we describe and predict on the assumption that it is making reasonable responses, given its desires and beliefs. In another paper, Dennett makes the link between intentional systems and the imputation of rationality even more explicit:

  1. A system’s beliefs are those it ought to have, given its perceptual capacities, its epistemic needs, and its biography. Thus in general, its beliefs are both true and relevant to its life …

  2.  A system’s desires are those it ought to have, given its biological needs and the most practicable means of satisfying them. Thus (naturally evolved) intentional systems desire survival and procreation, and hence desire food, security, health, sex, wealth, power, influence, and so forth, and also whatever local arrangements tend (in their eyes – given their beliefs) to further these ends in appropriate measure …

  3.  A system’s behavior will consist of those acts that it would be rational for an agent with those beliefs and desires to perform.7

On this theory, it is only when we regard an entity as constituting an intentional system that we can properly ascribe to it beliefs, interests, intentions, and the desire to communicate ideas and arguments. The consequence is that any interpretation of human action or discourse will be based on a strong presumption of rationality.

It is not clear whether Dennett goes so far as to say that there is never a false belief, an irrational action, or a mistake in reasoning. In the first passage quoted, the phrase ‘one assumes not just the absence of malfunction but the rationality of the design or programming as well’ suggests that his view will have this consequence. Dennett appears to be saying that, from the intentional standpoint, malfunctions are absent and design or programming has to be regarded as rational. These claims would entail that what we typically describe as faulty reasoning would be properly describable only in physicalistic terms, as the result of a physical breakdown of some type.

However, this interpretation of Dennett may not be correct, and the second passage quoted here, wherein the phrase ‘in general’ is used, seems to allow for errors within the intentional system, provided these are occasional.8 This ambiguity in Dennett’s work has been noted by Stephen Stich, who criticizes Dennett for making too strong a presumption of rationality. Stich says that ‘if we accept Dennett’s trade, we will have no coherent way to describe our cognitive shortcomings nor the process by which we may learn to overcome them.’9 Stich thus emphasizes the deeply conservative and anti-reformist implications of accounts of this type. Only if we believe that people sometimes commit errors in reasoning and arrive at incorrect beliefs will it make sense to try to improve reasoning and correct some of these beliefs.

We may make a presumption of rationality in the sense that we assume that generally other people are rational, or we may go further and assume that they are always rational. The discussions cited tend in the direction of saying that people are rational whenever we understand them. If we interpret them as irrational then, on this account, we have made a mistake: we do not correctly understand them.

If charity is a presumption of understanding, whether for translation or explanation, how strong a presumption is it? Does it outweigh other indications to the point of ruling out all poor logic, incoherent beliefs, absurdly false beliefs, irrational actions, and errors in reasoning? Or does it merely put the onus in favor of alternative ascriptions, allowing that sometimes other indications can rightly lead us to alternatives that are less than rational?

In ‘Rationality and Charity’, Paul Thagard and Richard Nisbett distinguish and criticize principles of charity that have been expressed as methodological canons of translation or social-scientific understanding. They note that such principles have seldom been spelled out precisely, and distinguish different levels of strength:

  1.  Do not assume a priori that people are irrational.

  2.  Do not give any special prior favor to the interpretation that people are irrational.

  3.  Do not judge people to be irrational unless you have an empirically justified account of what they are doing when they violate normative standards.

  4.  Interpret people as irrational only given overwhelming evidence.

  5. Never interpret people as irrational.10

Thagard and Nisbett argue that principles of charity as stringent as (4) and (5) are methodologically unsound, whether the context is that of translation (radical and domestic), or understanding inference, or understanding choice. Principles at level (3) are principles of moderate charity; those at levels (4) and (5) are principles of strong charity.

For translation, Thagard and Nisbett claim that, given background knowledge, we may have excellent empirical reasons to ascribe a false belief, or even a contradictory set of beliefs to a subject. In fact, in some cases, we may have a broader knowledge of cultural context which makes the imputation of a false belief or an ‘illogical’ set of statements extremely plausible. As an example, Thagard and Nisbett cite a passage in which Hegel is making a point about change which depends on his description of change as violating the principle of non-contradiction. A passage from his Logic is translated by A.V. Miller as ‘something moves, not because at one moment it is here and at another moment there, but because at one and the same moment it is here and not here, because in this ‘here’ it at once is and is not.’ Hegel apparently believed that motion was contradictory. According to Thagard and Nisbett, he used the German equivalents of ‘and’, and ‘not’ in ways so familiar that ‘no other translation would be appropriate’. Supporting Miller’s translation, Thagard and Nisbett comment that to ‘charitably’ interpret Hegel so that he did not violate the principle of non-contradiction would be to fail to take him seriously. It is not that Hegel did not write elsewhere as though the principle of non-contradiction was always generally true and applicable. Rather, in this passage he is trying to say that change is paradoxical.

On this account language can be used for social or other ends apart from communicating information; maintenance of principles of logic may be irrelevant to such ends. There can be sound empirical reasons for translating and interpreting so as to leave unorthodox beliefs unaffected. Thagard and Nisbett do note this point. It seems that Quine, at least, is not committed to disagreeing with it, provided that there is sufficient agreement on basic empirical beliefs and logical principles to give a foothold for understanding. Thagard and Nisbett conclude their discussion of translational charity by saying that very strong principles are empirically unsound.11

Strong methodological charity is, in fact, methodologically dangerous, precisely in contexts where we are trying to understand other languages, other minds, and other cultures. There is in some circles a presumption that to understand we must agree. This presumption surely deserves scrutiny. Even if we concede that in order to understand, we must agree a fair percentage of the time, that is not to say that understanding presumes full agreement all the time. There is an underlying difficulty with a model that insists on very wide agreement in order to ‘make sense’ of others’ discourse. A fundamental problem is that the otherness of other minds and cultures may be lost if charity goes too far. It may be true that without some presumptions of shared beliefs and a shared logic, understanding of language is impossible. But a presumption is a presumption. It can be outweighed in particular contexts by other considerations. With too much charity we will seek understanding of others to find only ourselves. What begins as a gesture toward tolerance will defeat itself by blocking understanding that emerge from an encounter of differences. Thagard and Nisbett are prepared to recommend charity only at levels (l), (2), and (3). I would share their caution.

Thagard and Nisbett call Davidson’s and Dennett’s principles ‘astoundingly strong’ and insist that they are empirically inadequate. It is possible, on their view, to have good empirical reasons to believe that other people hold beliefs that we do not hold, or make erroneous inferences about causes and other matters. If we make charity so strong as to rule out the ascription of false belief, faulty logic, or irrational action, we will bar any effort to correct beliefs and practices – whether our own or those of others.

There is no reason, however, why it should not be possible to determine empirically that a system is regularly using some inferential principle heuristic that departs from standard logical principles, then to use the operation of this heuristic as part of an explanation of the system’s behavior.12

Cultural anthropology does indeed require that we approach radically different belief systems with as great as possible a suspension of our own presuppositions, but nothing in the hermeneutic process requires us actually to accept the presuppositions of the exotic culture under study. We can understand a people’s belief that swamp light is spirit, or that sex and procreation are unrelated, without supposing that these particular belief systems have any truth at all.13

The trouble with strong charity is that it would have us discount the empirical evidence that can strongly favor interpretations of discourse and behavior that would not be ‘rational’ or ‘sensible’ in our terms. We may have good empirical evidence that a ceremony is done for the purpose of bringing rain, and good empirical evidence that the ceremony is seldom, in fact, followed by rain. We do not ourselves believe that ceremonies are customarily followed by rain but this by itself is not a sufficient reason not to ascribe such a belief to a tribe that practices rain dancing, when linguistic and contextual evidence point in that direction. To ascribe such a belief, we must be able to make it fit with linguistic and cultural patterns in the culture in which it is held. That is, in a weak sense, seeing the belief as sensible and rational, seeing it as held for a purpose and as serving that purpose, and thus as rational to that extent. Ascribing such a belief does not require seeing it as true or as warranted by evidence and reasoning. Nor does it require seeing it as a belief we would hold or one we would regard as adequately supported by evidence.

Richard Nisbett, Lee Ross, and others have conducted psychological experiments on inference.14 They claim that some errors are especially common in human subjects, and postulate that these errors tend to occur when ‘heuristics’ which are useful in some contexts are wrongly applied in others. Some psychologists and philosophers have criticized their work on various grounds, with some alleging uncharitable interpretation of particular moves by subjects and others alleging that imputing mechanisms that produce faulty reasoning is mistaken in principle.15 Whether Nisbett and Ross have interpreted their experimental responses correctly and whether they have used the appropriate standards of inductive inference is a topic beyond my present discussion, obviously. What is at issue here is inference error in the light of interpretive charity. If we were to adopt Dennett’s view, on its most radical interpretation, or if we were to regard the discourse of our subjects as one we have, in effect, to translate, using the strongest principles put forward by Quine and Davidson, we could not find inference errors, and this for methodological rather than empirical reasons. But such a strongly charitable approach is mistaken. It too greatly discounts the empirical evidence that can support alternative interpretations according to which behavior is not rational. It makes a presumption too much more than a presumption. It reduces, ultimately, to an insistence that others conform to our own standards and a resistance to the discovery of alternative standards or any recognition of a need to improve present performance.

In short, strong charity – levels (4) and (5) in Thagard and Nisbett’s analysis – is too strong for a sound interpretive methodology. If Quine, Wilson, Davidson, and Dennett really require principles of charity this strong for their philosophical purposes, their accounts stand in need of revision. Such principles are not adequate as a foundation for the empirical study of foreign tribes, foreign languages, domestic tribes, domestic language, or domestic inference. If moderate charity would serve those purposes, so much the better. If not, alternative approaches must be sought.

2. Charity and Argument Interpretation

The attitude of unquestioning respect for principles of strong charity in argument interpretation may owe something to the philosophical background just described. However, on reflection there seems to be only a tenuous connection between these broad philosophical contexts and the particular context of argument analysis. Interpretation is involved when we extract an argument from discourse in our own language. In this context we presume a basic understanding of customs, meaning, and syntax. We are not concerned to resolve scepticism about other minds, to understand the utterances or customs of a foreign culture, or to generate an epistemic basis for meaning or mind. We are interpreting a speech or text in order to determine whether it contains an argument and, if so, what that argument is. Any deep philosophical dependency on strong charity required for such broader tasks is the background, not the foreground.

There are at least six pertinent stages of interpretation, ordered roughly as follows:

  1. We determine whether the speech or passage contains an argument or not.

  2. We determine, for argumentative passages, which sentences within them express premises or conclusions.

  3. We determine, for terms within those sentences that are ambiguous or indeterminate in reference, what the meaning or referent is likely to be, and whether words are meant literally or figuratively.

  4. We decide what inference standard should be used to appraise the argument.

  5. We determine whether the stated premises and conclusion constitute the argument or whether there is implicit material that needs to be added.

  6. If we judge that there is implicit material to be added, we decide what that material is.

It is for these purposes that treatments of argument analysis have appealed to the principle of charity.16 A principle of charity functions as an interpretive principle used in the identification of the parts of arguments and in the clarification (where necessary) of meaning. This last use comes closest to the broader philosophical contexts wherein charity was proposed, but there is a crucial difference. It is the difference between foreign and domestic ‘translation’. Here, the broad philosophical theory of charity and interpretation would bear directly on charity for argument interpretation if we were to grant Quine’s analogy between radical and domestic translation and Davidson’s subsequent uses of it. On these views, very strong charity would be required for all interpretation of discourse, as a condition of making sense of what others have to say. Obviously, argumentative discourse would be included. But, as argued above, the radical-domestic analogy ignores significant pragmatic differences.

Strong charity is too strong to be methodologically sound. In argument analysis, if one term or structure poses semantic problems, these are resolved in a context where most other meanings and the general purpose of the discourse may be taken as understood. Typically, we do not face a radical problem in understanding the ‘idiolect’ of the argument, only a particular difficulty arising in this specific context.

That charity in argument interpretation is a lower level principle than those of Quine, Davidson, and Dennett is implicitly recognized in the rationales philosophers have offered for it. They do not claim that without charity we will be altogether unable to understand the language of other arguers or to ascribe to those speakers’ intentional states. Rather, they justify the principle on ethical or prudential grounds. They say that it would be ‘unfair’ or ‘unkind’ to arguers to give their discourse anything less than a maximally sympathetic interpretation; in effect this seems to be a claim that persons interpreting and evaluating arguments are morally obligated to be charitable. Or they say that it is imprudent to criticize an argument on anything less than a maximally sympathetic interpretation, because when we do, the argument can too easily be revised so as to make our analysis irrelevant. We can find these themes in Michael Scriven’s classic account.

The Principle of Charity requires that we try to make the best rather than the worst, possible interpretation of the material we’re studying. That is. even if, as a matter of strict grammar, we could shoot the writer down for having said something that doesn’t follow or isn’t strictly true, it may be more charitable to reinterpret the passage slightly in order to make more ‘sense’ out of it, that is, to make it mean something that a sensible person would be more likely to have really meant. We’ll do this all the time. It doesn’t mean letting people off the hook entirely by assuming they couldn’t possibly have meant something just because it turns out to be unsound or untrue; most of us make such mistakes quite often. What the Principle of Charity does mean is that taking ‘cheap shots’ is something we shouldn’t waste much time doing … The Principle of Charity is more than a mere ethical principle, but it is at least that … It requires you to be fair or just in your criticisms ... they shouldn’t take advantage of a mere slip of the tongue or make a big point out of some irrelevant point that wasn’t put quite right … The Principle of Charity does coincide with good practical advice about powerful and efficient argument analysis. It tells you that you want to interpret the argument’s meaning in whatever way makes the most sense and force out of it, because otherwise, it can easily be reformulated slightly in order to meet your objections.17

Scriven seems to express both moderate and then strong charity in this passage. Thomas is similar, saying that charity makes sense in terms of kindness to authors and personal strategy.18 A different approach is taken by Jonathan Adler.19 He proposes that charity be adopted for epistemic reasons.

Whether the reasons underlying interpretive charity are ethical, prudential, epistemic, or a combination of these, it is clear that on these accounts charity is seen as an option at the practical level, rather than a broadly theoretical necessity. To fail to employ strong or moderate charity would not be to lose our grip on understanding altogether, but rather (it is alleged) to do something unethical, imprudent, or epistemically inefficient.

Consider the following example, found in a column on the eastern bloc boycott of the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics. Discussing the Soviet decision, columnist William Gold wrote that the 1980 Moscow Olympics would have served to legitimize Marxism in the eyes of communists around the world and that the western boycott of those games had deeply hurt the Soviet government of the day. He said that, though regrettable, the decision to boycott the Los Angeles games was obviously preferable to the ‘atomic frying of civilians’. Adding several comments about alternative prospects for the Olympics and international sports, Gold then wrote:

Two things are certain. The nuclear weaponry now in place will not disappear. Even if arms control talks were to resume in earnest, the best that could be hoped from them would be a reduction in the pace of growth. And the implacable hostility will not abate, either. Nor should it. Every free society has legitimate sympathy for those elsewhere who would be free. Every totalitarian regime seeks dominion over its neighbors. This conflict is fundamental. The challenge of our times is to pursue it through avenues that do not lead to the total war that will be unwinnable for all. In that quest, even the price of the Summer Games as now constituted is not too much to pay, and there are means at hand to minimize the loss. 20

This passage poses interpretive questions at all four of the levels identified earlier. Is Gold arguing that the loss of the games is a small price to pay, on the grounds that with nuclear weapons and international hostility a part of the scene, this price is so much lower than alternative costs? Or is he merely saying this, with the points about nuclear weapons and international competition included as interesting and important background? There are no indicator words in the passage, and the many paragraph breaks could be interpreted as evidence that no line of reasoning is being put forward. On the other hand, the words ‘in that quest’ in the final paragraph provide some evidence that the author links that boycott of the Summer Games to the ‘implacable conflict’ he has described and intends somehow to reason from the nature of the latter to the reasonableness of sacrificing the former. The statements can naturally be arranged into an argument and Gold seems definite and categorical in his assertions, suggesting that he takes what he has to say very seriously.

If Gold is arguing, what are his premises? Would his comment about totalitarian regimes be a premise for his view on the Olympics, or not? It is easy to falsify the claim that every totalitarian regime seeks domination over its neighbors. (To cite a case, Albania in the 1980s was a totalitarian regime, and did not.) Gold says that nuclear weaponry ‘will not disappear’ and that implacable hostility ‘will not abate’. Does he mean ‘never’ or ‘not in the foreseeable future’? If the former, the claim is far too strong to be verified and forty years experience with nuclear weapons would be very thin evidence for it; the author would surely have an unacceptable premise, on this interpretation.

If we regard this column as expressing an argument, there will be alternative ways of construing the structure of that argument. Are there missing premises that superpower hostility must be expressed and that either war or such tit-for-tat manoeuvres as happened with the 1980 and 1984 Olympics are the only ways that conflict can be expressed?

We can usefully look at this passage as providing an example of the issues to which a principle of charity in argument interpretation is applied. The problem is not that we fail, as yet, to grasp the tribal custom of writing newspaper columns, or that we cannot determine whether the columnist is an intentional system. It is not that we fail to understand what ‘Moscow’, ‘Los Angeles’, and ‘Olympics’ refer to. Rather, there are more specific issues arising in this particular case about how strongly to take the terms ‘will not’ and ‘every’, and about whether the discourse is intended as an argument. Charity would move us in the direction of interpreting the passage as a nonargument. It would push us toward taking problematic terms in such a way that something qualified and thus relatively plausible is stated. For ‘The nuclear weaponry now in place will not disappear’, we would read ‘The nuclear weaponry now in place will not disappear in the foreseeable future’, or something similar. For ‘Every totalitarian regime’ we would read ‘most totalitarian regimes’, and so on.

A consideration of this example provides a vivid illustration of why a general account of charity cannot plausibly be derived from ethical, prudential, or epistemic principles. First, consider the matter of ethics. The columnist is an influential person; his audience is potentially 100,000 readers or more; he usually writes clearly and well and is a respected commentator on local, national, and international affairs. On one reading, he is claiming that a nuclear arms stand-off between the superpowers is a permanent aspect of life. His comments, on one quite natural interpretation, entail that a change in the nuclear situation is impossible ever. On another they entail that it is impossible in our time. On yet another, we may take the claim to apply only to the next ten or twenty years. The unclarity of the claim is highly significant. The ambiguity may lead people to accept the claim, taking a weaker interpretation on which it is plausible. They may then confusedly accept the stronger claim because they fail to notice the equivocation. Given the seriousness of the issue and the size of his audience this columnist can influence, it is most implausible to say that our ethical obligation is to assume that the columnist meant to assert whichever one of these claims is most likely true. Far from having an ethical obligation to take the most plausible interpretation, in any context in which we were analyzing this argument and had a substantial audience ourselves, we would have an ethical obligation to point out the lack of clarity and the fact that, on the very strongest interpretation, there is little reason to think the claims are true. The columnist’s substantial audience may be lulled by the ambiguity into giving credence to the boldest claim despite the fact that it is asserted with no supporting evidence, and is almost certainly false. The matter is of considerable political significance.

If a person makes ambiguous or unclear remarks, what is ‘fair’ to him is to tactfully point out the unclarity. But if one assumes an ethical perspective on interpretive charity, that takes us beyond the arguer himself to broader ethical considerations. These may involve policy, principles, events, and other affected persons. A maximally charitable version of discourse is not demanded for ethical reasons. In contexts sufficiently serious, ethics may indicate quite the reverse.

Nor does prudence clearly indicate opting for the most plausible interpretation in such a case; this will depend on our relevant purposes and interests. Where prudence leads will depend on what we are doing, who our analysis is for, whether the arguer is present or absent, how sharp the arguer is, and many other things. If the arguer is absent, and our purpose is to convince our own audience of a point of view different from his, prudence alone could indicate taking a minimally sympathetic reading of an argument and dismissing it quickly.

Thus, ethical and prudential considerations will not always recommend charity. Although moderate charity may well be an appropriate principle of interpretation, we cannot derive it from these sources. At best, their principles would indicate charity in some contexts.

Nor is an epistemic approach much better for this purpose. Jonathan Adler, in an essay entitled ‘Why Be Charitable?’, locates the principle of charity in the broad context of the epistemic goal of seeking truth. Adler says:

If the study of informal logic is construed as within the theory of inquiry, then it should seek analyses and evaluations that bring us closer to the truth. Presumably this implies that we want to maximize truth-relevant or epistemically relevant considerations over pragmatic or ethical ones in defending certain approaches, rules, or principles. The Principle of Charity should be justified, at least as a first try, as significant for finding out whether the conclusion is correct, given the premises, rather than merely winning the argument. We want to formulate arguments at their best or greatest strength because that makes the evaluation a more ‘severe’ test. The more severe test – a stronger statement of the argument – is more likely to reveal falsity (failure of the line of reasoning than a less severe one) (weaker statement of the argument).21

Adler recommends charity in argument interpretation on the grounds that argument interpretation and analysis are part of inquiry and the purpose of inquiry is to find truth. He endorses the Popperian view that truth is found by severe criticism. Criticism tests most revealingly when hypotheses are formulated as strongly as possible.

Several background assumptions are open to question in this account. Adler seems to mean by ‘theory of inquiry’ the philosophy of science and epistemology. It is not clear that informal logic or the theory of argument is properly part of these subjects. Key topics are different and so is the range of examples. Most questionable is Adler’s belief that argument interpretation and evaluation have as their purpose the determination of the truth of the conclusion. If the purpose of argument analysis were to determine whether the conclusion is true, we would analyze arguments by bringing forward everything we knew that was positively or negatively relevant to the conclusion. There would be no need to interpret stated premises or to restrict ourselves to the reasoning used by the arguer. In fact, on this view, it is hard to see why interpretation of other people’s discourse is part of argument analysis at all, except to extract conclusions which we go on to consider from our own point of view. The stated premises would be pertinent only insofar as we may find them acceptable or they may remind us of something else that counts in favour of the conclusion. Adler qualifies his account by noting that we are trying to determine whether the conclusion is true, ‘given the premises’. For this latter purpose, which better approximates the purpose of argument evaluation, charity may be important. But it is unclear that it can be rationalized epistemically.

A major problem for Adler’s epistemic account of interpretive charity is that interpretive canons are to be applied in determining what the premises are. This is a different aspect of evaluation from the logico-epistemic task of determining whether a conclusion is true, given the premises. Charitable alterations of stated premises or supplementations of stated premises will not give a good estimate of whether the conclusion is true, ‘given the premises’. It will show whether the conclusion is true given some slightly or dramatically different premises, which is something else entirely. Charity is working in the wrong place for Adler’s epistemic rationale to apply properly. We have yet to find a suitable rationale for the charity so commonly urged as a basis for argument interpretation.

A problem with Scriven’s classic account of charity for argument interpretation concerns his directive to search for the best interpretation. This directive itself may be interpreted in several ways. What is best? Scriven may mean only that we should interpret discourse carefully, paying close attention to nuances of meaning, possible irony and ridicule, aspects of context, and so on. This sort of charity, which I would call truistic charity, is unproblematic. Of course we should appreciate such aspects of discourse; no one has denied it. At the opposite extreme is strong charity. Urging us to find the best interpretation, Scriven may mean to find that interpretation according to which the passage emerges as the most plausible and rationally ordered. It could appear either as an nonargument or as the best argument we could get out of it. This interpretation is suggested by Scriven’s phrase ‘make it mean something that a sensible person would be more likely to have really meant’. The expression ‘make it mean’ rather suggests that we would be prepared to ignore empirical indicators of implausible assertions or faulty reasoning so as to make a passage out as more rational than it first appears to be. The pitfalls of ignoring or discounting pertinent empirical evidence are evident here, just as they are in the contexts discussed by Thagard and Nisbett. This strong charity would apparently license considerable deletion, addition, and clarification in order to generate plausible, relevant premises and accurate reasoning. It has been applied by some conscientious philosophers with enormous energy, as Ralph Johnson pointed out in his well-known essay, ‘Charity Begins at Home’.22 Strong charity forces on logicians and critics the obligation to construct good arguments from sketchy and insignificant materials, an onerous task they may rightly resist, and one which may only disguise or whitewash the genuine carelessness and stupidity which are sometimes present in real discourse.

I contend then that strong charity is just as problematic in argument interpretation as it is in broader philosophical contexts. There may be much empirical evidence in favor of the not-so-charitable alternative interpretation. Strong charity licenses too much alteration of the data. It courts misunderstanding and ethnocentrism insofar as making others out to be sensible amounts, in practical terms, to making them out to agree with us. Strong charity in argument interpretation might be recommended for some limited purposes and in some special contexts, but it will not be satisfactory as a general, over-riding interpretive principle.

Applying charity to Scriven’s explanation of charity, what is most likely is that he intended to recommend something between truistic and strong charity. I would term this moderate charity. When other indicators (context, logical pattern, professed intention, indicator words) count equally in favour of several distinct interpretations, we adopt the one that generates the most plausible argument.

Obviously, moderate charity needs further explanation. What are all these other indicators? What do we do in the typical case where they do not count exactly equally for several distinct interpretations? What is the most plausible argument, if we have to choose between a version with unacceptable premises and good reasoning, and a version with acceptable premises and poor reasoning? We still need a more precise expression of moderate charity for argument analysis. And, seeing that ethical, prudential, and epistemic foundations are unpromising as a rationale for charity, we need an account of moderate charity that will tell us why it is an appropriate interpretive principle for argument assessment. Beginnings of such an account are offered below.

3. A Preliminary Account of Moderate Charity

In ‘Logic and Conversation’ H.P. Grice sets forth a Cooperative Principle for discourse. He points out that exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks. They require some cooperative effort and purpose. Because there is always some minimum of common purpose, there are some possible conversational moves that would not be suitable.

We might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be expected (ceteris paribus) to observe, viz. ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which is occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.’ One might label this the Cooperative Principle (CP).23

One purpose of conversational exchange is to have a maximally effective exchange of information; Grice notes that this, although an important purpose of discourse, is not the only such purpose. Given it, we might derive a number of maxims participants should follow. Grice proposes these:

Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Avoid obscurity of expression
Avoid ambiguity.
Be relevant.

and a number of others. Human ‘talk exchanges’ are a type of rational purposive behavior, and these maxims are reasonable to follow, given the aims we have.

As is well known, Grice uses his account of logic and conversation to give an explanation of the pragmatic paradoxicality of Moore’s ‘it’s raining, but I don’t believe it’, and the differences between truth functional connectives and the ordinary language ‘meaning’ of related terms. Aspects of the account are suggestive for charity as well, though Grice himself did not discuss this subject. 24

Grice’s Principle of Cooperation is formulated so as to focus primarily on one partner in the conversational exchange: the speaker. If we consider argumentative exchange as a special case of conversational exchange, and adopt the perspective of the audience rather than that of the speaker (or arguer), we can generate a principle of charity as a particular application of the Principle of Cooperation.

What is an argumentative exchange? It is a discussion (spoken or written) in which parties are setting forth reasons to support their beliefs and opinions, usually in order to rationally persuade or convince each other. These arguments are related, at least in the sense that the beliefs and opinions are about the same subject, and ideally in the further sense that the arguments of one participant are at least sometimes a response to those of another. The purposes of an argumentative exchange are to communicate information, beliefs, and opinions, to persuade others by reasons that one’s own beliefs and opinions are true or acceptable, and to check and, if necessary, revise one’s own beliefs and opinions through rational evaluation. Thus, in arguing we have a social practice of presenting and mutually evaluating evidence and reasons for our claims and beliefs. We offer arguments and consider arguments to defend and rationally consider claims and beliefs. We defend beliefs primarily in order to persuade others that they are true, and we attend to other people’s arguments from reciprocity and a desire to find out whether we should be persuaded by what they have to say. This is the major point of arguing, just as exchanging information is the major point of conversation.

This is not to say that every case where an argument appears is a case where the arguer genuinely wishes to rationally persuade a rationally critical audience. Rather it is to say that the practice or social institution of argument has this as its typical function or purpose. The point is not straightforwardly empirical, but conceptual and normative. Argument as a social practice exists so that we may mutually communicate and amend our beliefs, as warranted by shared reasons and evidence. Written argument spreads this process over a broader audience and longer time span than spoken audience. It makes audience response less certain and immediate than in speech contexts. Nevertheless, the possibility of such response is always there, and good written argumentation is attentive to this fact. On this account, written argument and criticism may be seen as a derivative of spoken discussion.

From such a conception of argumentative practice, we may derive a principle of charity, just as Grice derived his Cooperative Principle from his concept of the normal function of conversation. The principle of charity will direct the audience to interpret an arguer’s discourse in a way that will conform to the purpose of arguing and considering arguments. Such a principle will direct us to interpret the discourse of others so as to contribute to the argumentative exchange. We presume, other things being equal, that others are participating in the social practice of rational argumentation. That is, they are trying to give good reasons for claims they genuinely believe, and they are open to criticism on the merits of their beliefs and their reasoning. They are operating within the purpose of the exchange: that is, it is their purpose to communicate information, acceptable opinions and reasonable beliefs, and to provide good reasons for some of these opinions and beliefs by offering good arguments. If we make this presumption, then if there is an ambiguity in the discourse, and we can interpret it either as well reasoned or as poorly reasoned, we will opt for the more sensible interpretation. The assumption that people are trying to put forward good reasons for claims that they believe provides a basis for moderate charity in the social practice of argument and its functional prerequisites.

On this view, the basis for charity is to be found not in ethics, prudence, or epistemology, but in the nature and purpose of the activity in which participants are engaging: argument. That people are exchanging what they take to be good reasons for their views when they appear to be is a rebuttable presumption. If we presume their participation, a moderately charitable approach to what they say is indicated, as an application of the Principle of Cooperation. If for one reason or another, the presumption would not be appropriate – some persons lack all credibility, others may be significantly handicapped, or the context may be one in which people seek to persuade with no regard for the quality of reasons and evidence, then there is no justification for approaching the discourse charitably – not even moderately charitably.

A principle of charity that is rationalized in this way is moderate, not strong. Given the purpose of argumentative discourse, that must be the case: the purpose of argumentative exchange is the defense and discussion of conflicting or potentially conflicting opinions and beliefs. (Typically we do not argue for beliefs upon which we and our audience already agree.) The very concept of argument implicitly refers to disagreement between parties. Hence strong charity, where we would interpret others as making true or well-warranted claims contrary to empirical evidence, would undermine the purpose of the practice of argument. In any event strong charity is flawed in several fundamental respects. First, it licenses too much manipulation of empirical evidence which would support imputations of false or implausible beliefs, or flawed reasoning. Second, it puts at risk the ‘otherness’ of other minds by directing us to find in others’ beliefs and reasoning which are ‘correct’ and thereby similar to our own. Third, it prevents us from trying to correct beliefs or improve arguments, since we are committed to interpreting all arguments as sensible to begin with. The problem with strong charity could be stated this way: it makes the presumption of rationality in others overbearing instead of having it function as one interpretive factor among others.

The pull between charity and other factors can be seen in this account of argumentative discourse. Its primary purpose is an interchange of evidence and reasons for beliefs. This notion presumes that minds are interacting with other minds. We allow the possibility of revising our own beliefs and our own reasoning. Strong charity directs us to find true or plausible beliefs, and to interpret so as to find good reasoning. In effect, this will be the same as interpreting so as to maximize agreement with our own beliefs and our own standards of reasoning. Necessarily, we determine truth, plausibility, and accuracy of reasoning according to our own standards. Thus, the idea that other beliefs, controversial from our own point of view, may be encountered in an argumentative exchanged, is jeopardized when charity is strong. If we insist on interpreting others so as to make them out as correct by our standards, this aspect will disappear.

Grice’s idea of cooperation is useful here. By communicating and rationally scrutinizing evidence and reasons for beliefs different from our own, argumentative exchanges allow us to cooperate with those who may differ. To sacrifice this ‘otherness’ would defeat the purpose of the exchange. By applying the Cooperative Principle, we arrive at moderate charity rather than strong charity. If we focus on communication between different selves and on allowing the revision of our own views, we find reason to allow that others may make statements that we do not find plausible, or use reasoning that we regard as flawed. We presume that others who participate in the practice of argument and rational discussion intend to convey sensible claims and to support these claims with well-reasoned arguments. We also presume that they may differ from us. Other arguers regard their beliefs and arguments as sound; we may or may not. We do not have to agree to understand. The charity that emerges is moderate charity.

Moderate charity directs us not to interpret others as having made implausible claims or faulty inferences unless there is good empirical reason to do so. Empirical reason is provided in the first instance by the wording of the discourse and also by the context in which the discourse appears and background knowledge pertaining to the arguer. If the arguer has known interests or prejudices, this may also affect our interpretation of his or her claims and reasons. If someone writes to the editor and says:

Calgary is an unfriendly city, because the people at the zoo were very unfriendly to me when I was there.

there is a good empirical reason to see him as having offered an argument in which the inference is hasty. The empirical evidence that there is an argument is first of all his use of ‘because’, a logical indicator, and secondly the context of the letter to the editor, which is one in which people typically express strong held opinions and try to convince others that these are true. Moderate charity allows us to interpret the discourse this way, because there are sound empirical reasons for doing so. We allow that, although on reflection we do not find the inference sound, the arguer might deem it sound. Or, more likely, he might simply have been careless.25

The presumption made in argumentative discourse is one of reasonable participation in the specific exchange, not of ubiquitous rationality according to our own standards of what rationality is. Such a presumption is sufficient for the purpose of the discourse and for other philosophical purposes. It is a presumption that can be defeated. When it is, the rationale even for moderate charity will disappear. When relevant empirical evidence does not determine one or another interpretation and moderate charity is indicated, we adopt that interpretation according to which the claims made are most plausible and the inferences most reasonable.

An example can be found in a dispute between Atomic Energy of Canada and the Manitoba government concerning the storage of radioactive wastes in deep underground vaults. In response to the Manitoba government’s statement that the AECL had offered no evidence the storage was safe, AECL president James Donnelly replied that all evidence shows that ‘reactor wastes, which will remain highly radioactive for almost as long as mankind has walked the earth, can be safely disposed of deep in underground vaults.’26 An issue of charity arises here concerning the meaning of the key word ‘safe’. It might be taken to mean ‘poses no risk at all of harm to humans or the environment’ or alternately to mean ‘poses only a small, acceptable risk of harm to humans or the environment’. If we regard Donnelly as someone who is sincerely participating in an argumentative exchange here, and apply moderate charity to his remarks, we would take ‘safe’ in the second sense, since his claim has a better chance of being true on that interpretation.

Another example was discussed in Ralph Johnson’s paper on charity. It goes like this:

Cats are free spirits, the last really independent creatures around. You can no more license cats than you can license the wind. Dogs may submit to bureaucracy. Cats won’t. The same spirit tends to rub off on cat owners. They have enough trouble being pushed around by their cats without being asked to submit to man-made laws. Besides, there’s an economic factor. They’ve never had to buy licenses, so why start? No ... it just won’t work.27

In this passage, there seems to be an argument for the conclusion that a policy of licensing cats won’t work. Two premises, stated near the end, are that cat owners will oppose licensing due to previous freedom and that cat owners will oppose licensing due to costs. There are several further elements in the passage which might be taken as humorous flourishes or might be regarded as serious parts of the argument. Two are ‘You can no more license cats than you can license the wind’, and ‘They (owners) have enough trouble being pushed around by their cats without being asked to submit to man-made laws’. As for the cat-wind connection, we might take it as a serious analogy intended to support the statement that cats are free spirits, in a sub-argument. However, it would be a tenuous analogy to be sure. We might take the comment about owners being pushed around as a premise in a sub-argument supporting the underlying idea that owners will be opposed to licensing. But taking this literally is implausible: the domination of owners by cats seems deliberately exaggerated as a kind of mild joke. The claim, as stated, would not be acceptable if taken literally. Similarly, we may ask how to read ‘Cats are free spirits, the last really independent creatures around’. It does seem to be a crucial premise in the argument that cats are free spirits, but should we take ‘the last really independent creatures around’ really seriously? (If we do, it is easily vulnerable to objections — for example, robins and sparrows are around, and they seem free.) The phrase might alternatively be interpreted as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the author’s main assertion that cats are free spirits.

Applying moderate charity to the passage, we would avoid committing the author to the sub-argument based on an analogy between cats and the wind and we would take the other two elements as literary flourishes not intended to make literal substantive claims. The passage as stated provides no indication that these elements are to be regarded as parts of serious argumentation or as substantive claims. If taken as such, they would be very vulnerable to criticism. Furthermore, a fairly clear argument can be extracted from the passage without including these elements as parts and no ‘forced’ approach to the discourse is required in order to do this. Applied to this passage, moderate charity would yield the following argument:

  1. Cats are free spirits.

  2. Cat owners will oppose licensing cats.

  3. Cat owners will resist paying to license cats when they have not had to pay before.
    So,

  4. Licensing cats would not work.

Let us now return to William Gold’s passage on Cold War relations and the Olympics and employ an interpretive strategy of moderate charity. There are no indicator words in the passage. Nevertheless, it seems natural and easy to arrange it as a structured argument. Gold states as certainties two basic claims – first that nuclear weaponry will not disappear and second that the hostility between the superpowers will not abate. (One might try to water down these claims, to make them more plausible, but this would be a shift to strong charity and would ignore clear textual evidence. The author after all, starts out by categorically saying ‘Two things are certain’, and these are the two things.) For these supposedly certain claims, Gold offers some support in each case – nuclear weaponry will not disappear because even successful arms control talks would issue at best in a reduction, and hostility will not abate because free societies sympathize with those wanting freedom and totalitarian regimes seek domination over their neighbours. Gold then makes the further claim that the conflict is fundamental – supported by the considerations about unabated hostility between freedom and totalitarianism. He adds that the conflict must be pursued short of total war. From this he infers that the price of the Summer Games is not too high, especially considering that the loss can be minimized. (Do we need a missing premise here, to the effect that sacrificing the Summer Games is the only safe way to pursue the hostility at the time of writing? If so, this will give another easily refuted premise. We’ll ignore this problem for the moment, but it does arise.) We could easily set out this passage as an argument.

  1.  The nuclear weaponry now in place will not disappear.

  2. Even the most successful arms control talks would only reduce the amount of nuclear weaponry.

  3. Implacable hostility between the superpowers will not and should not disappear.

  4. Every free society has legitimate sympathy for those who want to be free.

  5. Every totalitarian regime seeks domination over its neighbors.

  6. The conflict between free societies and totalitarian regimes is fundamental.

  7. The conflict between free societies and totalitarian regimes must be pursued short of total war.

  8. There are means to minimize the loss of the Summer Olympic Games.
    Therefore,

  9. The loss of the Summer Olympic Games is not too high a price to pay for the benefit of pursuing the fundamental conflict between superpowers.

There are several sub-arguments. (2) is offered to support (1); (4) and (5) are offered to support (3); then (1), (3), (6), (7), and (8) link so as to support (9). The argument will turn out to be seriously flawed, due to its containing in an essential role easily falsified premises, and due to the gap between the combined premises and the specific conclusion about the Games. (We could eliminate the gap by adding a premise, but were we to do so new problems would only arise because that premise would be easily shown false.) That is, strong charity would have to outweigh empirical evidence which points quite unambiguously in one direction, in this case. Moderate charity will not do this. The passage should thus be seen as expressing an argument – one that is flawed.

4. Concluding Comments

One objection to the above account of the purpose of arguing and the basis of moderate charity might be that it is too idealistic, seeing arguers and listeners as more honorable than they in fact are. It focuses too much on rationality and too little on persuasion. It might be urged that some arguers do not intend to persuade their audience by offering good reasons but rather to persuade their audience by offering whatever is likely to be effective. They intend only a result, and may care nothing for reasoned argument or plausibility of claims as a means to that result. It must be admitted that this is often the case. Advertisements and political propaganda are important cases in point. Even in less manipulative contexts, there are some discussants who seek only to manipulate opinion in this way. Sometimes an immediate need is so important, or the possibility of more rationally based persuasion so remote that such methods may be ethically justifiable.

Gilbert Ryle once argued that we can have counterfeit coins only if we have, or have had, real money. John Austin said that people are able to pretend only if the real thing is known and understood.28 In an analogous way, propaganda and other manipulative persuasion may get their point from genuine argumentation and reasoning. We may erroneously take nonrational persuasion, expressed in the trappings of rational persuasion, to be a genuine case of rational persuasion. Possibly our susceptibility to some of the forms of pseudo-rational persuasion is due to their facade of rationality. Discourse may contain no reasoning or evidence and yet have the appearance of doing so. It may be put forward by someone whose sole goal is persuasion and who has no respect for canons of sound argumentation. Yet, its semantic surface may be that of genuine argumentation and its persuasive power due in part to that fact. Forms of propaganda owe their success to the institution of genuine argumentation.

The distinction between education and propaganda might be drawn in these terms. The social practice of rational argument and debate is more fundamental than pseudo rational persuasion or propaganda, though they are profoundly important both in themselves and with regard to their social and political consequences. The present account of arguing stipulates the purpose of argumentative discourse as such, not the purpose or intention of every individual and institution engaging in it.

Because argumentative discourse has the purpose of rational, considered, reflective, and mutual persuasion, we presume in most contexts that arguers have these purposes. If we obtain evidence to the contrary, then the rationale for moderate charity no longer applies. There is no reason to apply even moderate charity to a twenty second television advertisement, because we know that the writers and sponsors do not intend to persuade by reason, in this context. But until we have strong reason not to do so, we should assume that those engaging in what appears to be argumentative discourse are doing what they seem to be doing, namely participating in the social institution of rational persuasion and reflection. On this assumption, we adopt a principle of moderate charity as a general guide in argument interpretation.

Notes

This essay benefitted from a discussion in the Philosophy Department at the University of Calgary in August, 1985 especially from comments by Kai Nielsen and Gertrude Ezorsky. In addition, I would like to thank Jonathan Adler for his careful reading of an earlier version, and for his helpful and detailed comments.

 

1. Neil Wilson, ‘Substances without Substrata’, Review of Metaphysics 12 (1959), pp. 39 – 54

2. W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), p. 59 and p.69.

3. W.V.O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 47.

4. Donald Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Proceedings and Addresses o[the American Philosophical Association, Volume XLVII (1973-4), pp. 5-20; p. 18.

5. See my discussion in ‘What’s Wrong with Slippery Slope Arguments?’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XII, number 2 (June, 1982), pp. 303-316.

6. Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms, (Montgomery, Vermont: Bradford Books, 1976), pp. 237-8.

7. Daniel Dennett, ‘Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology’, as quoted by Stephen Stich in ‘Dennett on Intentional Systems’, Philosophical Topics, Volume 12, I (Spring 1978).

8. See Stich, ‘Dennett on Intentional Systems’, for a longer discussion of this point. For our purposes, the issue may be put as follows: if Dennett is saying that systems never go wrong, his view is totally implausible. If he is saying they sometimes go wrong, and wrongness can be understood only as aberration against rightness, then his view may be unobjectionable, but does not support strong charity for attribution of mental states.

9. Stich, ‘Dennett on Intentional Systems’, p. 47.

10. Paul Thagard and Richard E. Nisbett, ‘Rationality and Charity’, Philosophy of Science, Volume 50 (1983), pp. 250-267; p. 252.

11. Ibid., p. 255.

12. Ibid., p. 257.

13. Ibid., p. 361. This is not to deny that disagreement in this sub-area will presume enough agreement as to basic logical principles and simple empirical concepts for translation to get started. Quine and Davidson are right if they are taken to mean only that there must be some common core in order to have understanding.

14. For a summary of many such results, see their Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1980).

15. Discussed in Stephen Stich, ‘Could Man Be an Irrational Animal?’, read at the University of Calgary in February, 1984. See also L.J. Cohen, ‘Are People Programmed to Commit Fallacies?’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 12 (1982), pp. 251-274 and L. J. Cohen, ‘On the Psychology of Prediction: Whose is the Fallacy?’, Cognition 7, pp. 385-407.

16. See S.N. Thomas, Practical Reasoning in Natural Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1981. Second Edition) pp. 15-16; Michael Scriven, Reasoning (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 71-76 and 175; Barrie Wilson, The Anatomy of Argument (New York: University Press of America, 1980), pp. 29-30 for some representative accounts. I have profited from David Hitchcock’s proposals for amending an earlier version of this list.

17. Scriven, Reasoning, p. 71.

18. Thomas, Practical Reasoning in Natural Language, p.16.

19. Jonathan Adler, ‘Why Be Charitable’, Informal Logic Newsletter, iv, 2 (May 1982), pp. 15-16. I appreciate the generous support Adler gave to my work.

20. William Gold, ‘Games Were Doomed Four Years Ago’, Calgary Herald, May 15, 1984.

21. Adler, ‘Why Be Charitable?’, p. 16. Compare my criticisms in ‘On Adler on Charity’, Informal Logic Newsletter iv, 3, (pp. 10-12) (July 1982), where some points made here are argued in more detail. Adler and I now seem closer in our views, as he sees the issue between closer interpretation and more generous reconstruction as relative to pragmatic considerations of purpose and efficiency.

22. Ralph H. Johnson, ‘Charity Begins at Home’, Informal Logic Newsletter, iii, 3, (June, 1981), pp. 4-9.

23. H.P. Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, reprinted in R.J. Fogelin, Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1978), pp. 329-343. Quoted passages are on pp. 332 and 333.

24. I do not wish to imply here that I accept Grice’s account regarding ordinary language and the truth functional connectives.

25.This approach was suggested to me by my former student, Jennifer Dance Flatman.

26. Reported in the Toronto Globe and Mail for October 29, 1985. The response seems question-begging.

27. Compare Ralph Johnson’s discussion of this example in ‘Charity Begins at Home’. Johnson reports that his students commonly take an example like this to contain an argument based on an analogy between cats and the wind.

28. This point was suggested to me by Kai Nielsen.

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