Download this publication - PULP

396 Chapter 17
I want to pry apart, in the next few pages, the use of the ‘principle of
charity’ – which I think has been misunderstood and may continue to be
misunderstood – from the critique that my previous writing had been overly
censorious and contingent upon an application argument that does not do all
the work that I claimed it does. This claim I now accept. My argument runs as
follows: The principle of charity is (a) not so much a tool (for ethnography) (b)
so much as it is an important feature of a much larger argument (c) about
how we understand the construction of language, truth conditions, and the
validity of philosophical and anthropological arguments that cast significant
doubt about relativism of many kinds.
Before I turn to the finer points of that argument, its important to note
what Professor Michelman did and did not claim for his Wikipedian version of
the principle of charity. First, we are, he says, engaged in a ‘lawyers’ kibitz’
over a range of Constitutional Court doctrines. Second, Professor Michelman
seems to me to be on firmer ground when he returns from Wikipedia and
identifies Davidson as ‘one of the principle’s chief philosophical architects
and expositors’, that Davidson also calls it ‘the principle of rational
accommodation’, and that Davidson summarises his position as follows: ‘We
make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we
interpret in a way that optimises agreement.’ 13 He then notes:
Davidson meant “optimise” as between thinking that the other must be holding
to beliefs (and, relatedly, aims) that differ drastically from our own (else he
couldn’t have said what he did), and thinking that we must not have heard him
right the first time. The philosophical underpinnings of the charity principle are
far afield from our concerns here and need not delay us. 14
I disagree with the last statement – ‘that the philosophical underpinnings …
need not delay us’. I have already heard ‘the principle of charity’ used,
incorrectly, in legal discourse in South Africa. It’s enticing to be able to
say that you are working with the ‘principle of charity’ and to be under the
misapprehension that it has something to do with charity per se when it
comes to a legal argument.
13
Michelman (n 1 above) 153 citing D Davidson ‘Thought and talk’ in Davidson (n 4
above) 197.
14 Michelman continues: ‘All that matters from that department is the motivation for
adherence to the principle, which the moniker ‘charity’ does not very well convey. The
aim of interpretive charity is not generosity toward others, or anything like that. It is
not to pay homage, deference, or respect to our interlocutors, or to avoid giving
offense. It is not to demonstrate our own good manners, or to toe some Goody Two-
Shoes line against critiques that are not ‘constructive’. (I hold Stu Woolman’s pull-nopunches
style of court-watching to be entirely constructive and admirable.) No, the aim
of ‘charitable’ interpretation is not any of those. The aim is to learn. It is aggressively to
learn what there is to be learnt from puzzles the interlocutors pose to us, by assuming
there is method in their madness and doing our best to ferret that out, using everything
else we know or can guess (in part from their likeness and kinship to us) about where they
are coming from. ‘To see too much unreason on the part of others’, Davidson says, is ‘to
undermine our ability to understand what it is they are so unreasonable about.’ It is to
risk missing issues that might merit our consideration.’ Michelman (n 1 above) 4
(citations to Davidson omitted, my emphasis).