Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

166 Presuppositions and Pronouns
There is a further, more general, objection against Heim's argument: it
takes the wrong direction, in that it attempts to draw conclusions about the
speaker's beliefs on the basis of the beliefs that he ascribes to a third party,
instead of the other way round. Although the notion is notoriously hard to
make precise, it is generally accepted that in construing the beliefs of others
we operate on a principle of charity: we try to avoid the conclusion that other
people's beliefs are contradictory, we credit them with knowledge that we
take to be uncontroversial or commonly available, and so on. It is only
natural to assume that the same principle underlies our speaking of other
people's beliefs. Putting the point without any of the necessary nuances: if a
person a's doxastic context is the subject of a conversation, the interlocutors
will tend to assume that a believes what they believe. This is a caricature but
the basic idea is surely right. Heim's argument, however, proceeds in the
opposite direction, which is not nearly as plausible: in general, if I describe
someone as believing that 9, .