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Kibitzing with Frank Michelman on how to best read the Constitutional Court 397
What drives our collective preoccupation with the principle of charity?
In short, the principle reflects our ability to translate the words of even the
most obdurate interlocutors into propositions that we can understand, and,
furthermore, confidently credit as being true. Davidson strikingly suggests
that it makes no sense to speak of a language. If we can translate the words
and the actions of fellow speakers well enough to support that claim, then
it makes no sense to distinguish between different linguistic schemes. If
that assertion withstands inspection, then the epistemological claims of
conceptual relativism do not survive careful scrutiny. Thus, we can see an
ethical imperative at work: We owe our fellow human beings an
obligation, as subjects of equal concern and respect, to make the best
possible sense of what they are trying to convey to us.
3.1 ‘Thought and talk’
Donald Davidson is concerned with the truth. And the principle of charity
can be understood only once ‘truth’ is placed at the centre of things. In
‘Thought and talk’, Davidson writes:
One thing that gradually dawned on me was that while Tarksi intended to analyse
the concept of truth by appealing ... to the concept of meaning (in the guise of
sameness of meaning or translation), I have the reverse in mind. I considered
truth to be the central primitive concept ... Something else that was slow coming to
me was that since I was treating theories of truth as empirical theories, the axioms
and theorems had to be viewed as laws. So a theorem like ‘Schnee ist weiss’ is
true in the mouth of a German speaker if and only if ‘snow is white’ has to be
taken not merely as true, but as capable of supporting counterfactual claims. Indeed,
given that the evidence for this law, if it is one, depends ultimately on certain causal
relations between speakers and the world, one can say that it is no accident that
‘Schnee is weiss’ is true if and only if snow is white; it is the whiteness of snow that
makes ‘Schnee is weiss’ true. 15
Snow is ‘white’ – because it is white in the world – in English or Sepedi or
German or Zulu – and not because it is ‘white’ relative to a particular
linguistic set of conventions. Of course, that does not mean that our
statements about the world cannot be ‘false’. As Davidson powerfully puts
the point:
But of course it cannot be assumed that speakers never have false beliefs. Error
is what gives belief its point. We can, however, take it is as given that most beliefs
are correct. The reason for this is that a belief is identified by its location in a
pattern of beliefs: it is this pattern that determines the subject matter of the
belief, what the belief is about. Before some object in, or aspect of, the world
can become part of the subject matter of a belief (true or false) there must be
endless true beliefs about the subject matter. 16
15
D Davidson ‘Introduction’ in Davidson (n 4 above) xiv (my emphasis).
16 Davidson (n 13 above) 155, 168 (my emphasis).