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Abstract
Treating the principle of charity as a non‐empirical, foundational principle leads to insoluble problems of justification. I suggest instead treating semantic properties realistically, and semantic terms as theoretical terms. This allows us to apply ordinary scientific reasoning in meta‐semantics. In particular, we can appeal to widespread verbal agreement as an empirical phenomenon, and we can make use of probabilistic reasoning as well as appeal to theoretical simplicity for reaching the conclusion that there is a high rate of agreement in belief between speakers who have a high rate of verbal agreement. Although this does not by itself imply that the beliefs agreed upon are generally true, it does imply that any single speaker who is party to such a verbal agreement is justified in taking the other speakers to have mostly true beliefs. She is so justified because of the fact that it is incoherent to take her own beliefs not to be mostly true. Indirectly, this justifies a version of the principle of charity as an empirically correct principle.
Notes
1 Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the Prague Interpretation Colloquium, April 2005, and at the European Congress of Analytic Philosophy, Lisbon, August 2005. I am indebted to the audiences on those occasions, in particular to Bill Child, Bengt Hansson, Petr Kotatko, Max Kölbel, Bob Myers, Anna Pilatova, Barry Smith, and Åsa Wikforss. I also benefited from comments by Anna‐Sara Malmgren on the first draft. I have discussed the ideas in the paper at length with Kathrin Glüer, and I have discussed charity itself with her for many years: my greatest debt is to her. The research has been funded by a research grant from the Tercentenary Foundation of the Swedish National Bank.
2 That this was at some point Davidson’s own view was indicated by his remark that there is ‘room for adjustment on both sides’ (personal communication, 1998).
3 This is probably close to Fodor’s intentional realism.
4 To a large extent, speakers do factor in context dependence, agreeing on such sentences as ‘I am not wearing my glasses’, as uttered by one of them, when they are communicating.
5 This principle is fundamental in Davidson’s philosophy, since it is needed for connecting charity about belief with language interpretation.
6 By assumption it will in any case be close to d when a(t) is large.
7 In fact, it is provable that no matter what the meaning distributions of two speakers are, for every finite set of propositions there is a pair of belief distributions of the two speakers over the propositions in question such that full verbal agreement results.
8 This is meant in the simple sense that if, e.g., Elsa at some time observes pigs, Alfred at some – probably other – time also observes pigs, and so on, with only marginal remaining qualitative differences.
9 An alternative would be that they are equipped with very similar mechanisms but encountered very dissimilar observable environments. However, given the high degree of uniformity in the physical world, we dismiss that alternative.
10 We could, of course, drop the second clause of (PB) and merely allow for proxy‐related belief, but since (PB) would then be a consequence of (SB), the contrast would not be sharp enough.
11 This may take the form of an internal representation of f, but need not.
12 It is natural to suppose here that (PB) must be false for other reasons, since it postulates belief‐forming mechanisms that pretty reliably generate false beliefs. For instance, one would think that if Elsa forms the true belief that Dick is dangerous, and Alfred forms the false belief that f (Dick), i.e. Nick, is dangerous, Alfred but not Elsa will get into trouble by getting too close to Dick. This is not correct, however. For although Alfred will intend to avoid getting close to Nick, he will believe that he has succeeded exactly when when he is at a safe distance from Dick, for his belief then (barring mistakes of other kinds) will be the belief that he is at a safe distance from f (Dick), i.e. Nick.
In this way the mistakes in belief formation will not be detectable, simply because they will be fully systematic, and therefore cohere with the belief system as a whole. Only occasional, unsystematic mistakes can be revealed, because they will fail to cohere with other, true beliefs.
13 Moreover, in that case, we would still, mutatis mutandis, have the same conclusion as the one we reach below, i.e. the conclusion that there is real agreement in content. The difference would just be that, since contents would be more coarse‐grained, agreement would be easier to reach.
14 In Pagin, Citation1999 I argued that the principle of charity, as used by Davidson, only required accommodation, and therefore could not justify the idea that the semantics should be compositional. What justifies compositionality is its potential for explaining intersubjective agreement on new sentences, and if we do not ask for more than maximizing agreement on sentences already uttered – and therefore can choose the interpretation after the event – we can in general reach a higher rate of verbal agreement with a non‐compositional semantic theory. See also Pagin, Citation1999, Citation2003a, Citation2003b.