The original, good form of the principle of charity… well, actually, one or another principle under this name is decades old, or perhaps millennia; but in our circles, we can trace it back to Scott’s first post on Slate Star Codex, which I will quote almost in full:
This blog does not have a subject, but it has an ethos. That ethos might be summed up as: charity over absurdity.
Absurdity is the natural human tendency to dismiss anything you disagree with as so stupid it doesn’t even deserve consideration. In fact, you are virtuous for not considering it, maybe even heroic! You’re refusing to dignify the evil peddlers of bunkum by acknowledging them as legitimate debate partners.
Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.
There are many things charity is not. Charity is not a fuzzy-headed caricature-pomo attempt to say no one can ever be sure they’re right or wrong about anything. Once you understand the reasons a belief is attractive to someone, you can go ahead and reject it as soundly as you want. Nor is it an obligation to spend time researching every crazy belief that might come your way. Time is valuable, and the less of it you waste on intellectual wild goose chases, the better.
It’s more like Chesterton’s Fence. G.K. Chesterton gave the example of a fence in the middle of nowhere. A traveller comes across it, thinks “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here, it sure was dumb to build one” and so takes it down. She is then gored by an angry bull who was being kept on the other side of the fence.
Chesterton’s point is that “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here” is the worst reason to remove a fence. Someone had a reason to put a fence up here, and if you can’t even imagine what it was, it probably means there’s something you’re missing about the situation and that you’re meddling in things you don’t understand. None of this precludes the traveller who knows that this was historically a cattle farming area but is now abandoned – ie the traveller who understands what’s going on – from taking down the fence.
As with fences, so with arguments. If you have no clue how someone could believe something, and so you decide it’s stupid, you are much like Chesterton’s traveler dismissing the fence (and philosophers, like travelers, are at high risk of stumbling across bull.)
(Bolding mine, italics in original.)
A fair and reasonable principle, I think. We might also extend it—as, indeed, it has often been extended—to the injunction that opponents, and their arguments, ought not be dismissed merely because they appear to be evil. (For example, if it seems like I am suggesting that kittens must be tortured at every opportunity—well, who knows, perhaps I am?—but it is uncharitable to assume this, and to dismiss and denounce me for it, unless I’ve said this explicitly, or you’ve made a reasonable attempt to elicit a clarification, and I’ve confirmed that I am saying just that.)
So that is the unimpeachable idea. And what is the corruption? There are several, actually. Here’s one:
Yeah, sorry for being imprecise in my language. Can you just be charitable and see that my statement make sense if you replace “VNM” by “Dutch book” ?
Here, the suggestion is that being “charitable” requires that I mentally replace one technical term with another, totally different, technical term, turning a statement that is perfectly coherent—not absurd, not insane—but wrong, into a different statement that is correct. Evidently I am expected to do this with every one of my interlocutor’s statements. So, then what? Do I just assume that whenever anyone says anything to me that I think is wrong, what they actually mean is something correct? Is it just impossible for people to be wrong? Can I never be surprised by people’s claims? Is “huh, so what you’re saying is X? really?” totally out of the question? (Never mind the question of how I’m supposed to know what to “correct” my interlocutor’s comments to—it isn’t like there’s always, or even often, just one possible “correct” interpretation!)
And then the other corruption is the other side of the same coin. It’s what happens when people do apply this form of the “principle of charity”, and end up having conversations like some I’ve had recently, where I’ve been on the receiving end of this “charity”: I say something fairly straightforward, and my interlocutor, applying the principle of charity, and believing the literal or straightforward interpretation of my words to be evil (or something), mentally transforms my comments into something different (and, presumably, non-evil), and responds to that. Communication has not taken place; my words have not been heard.
There are other corruptions, too, more subtle ones (examples of which I’d have to take some time to hunt for), but these are more than bad enough!
Thanks for this. Sorry it’s taken me so long to reply here, didn’t mean to let this conversation hang for so long. I completely agree with about 99% of what you wrote here. The 1% I’ll hopefully address in the post I’m working on on this topic.
The original, good form of the principle of charity… well, actually, one or another principle under this name is decades old, or perhaps millennia; but in our circles, we can trace it back to Scott’s first post on Slate Star Codex, which I will quote almost in full:
(Bolding mine, italics in original.)
A fair and reasonable principle, I think. We might also extend it—as, indeed, it has often been extended—to the injunction that opponents, and their arguments, ought not be dismissed merely because they appear to be evil. (For example, if it seems like I am suggesting that kittens must be tortured at every opportunity—well, who knows, perhaps I am?—but it is uncharitable to assume this, and to dismiss and denounce me for it, unless I’ve said this explicitly, or you’ve made a reasonable attempt to elicit a clarification, and I’ve confirmed that I am saying just that.)
So that is the unimpeachable idea. And what is the corruption? There are several, actually. Here’s one:
(Source.)
Here, the suggestion is that being “charitable” requires that I mentally replace one technical term with another, totally different, technical term, turning a statement that is perfectly coherent—not absurd, not insane—but wrong, into a different statement that is correct. Evidently I am expected to do this with every one of my interlocutor’s statements. So, then what? Do I just assume that whenever anyone says anything to me that I think is wrong, what they actually mean is something correct? Is it just impossible for people to be wrong? Can I never be surprised by people’s claims? Is “huh, so what you’re saying is X? really?” totally out of the question? (Never mind the question of how I’m supposed to know what to “correct” my interlocutor’s comments to—it isn’t like there’s always, or even often, just one possible “correct” interpretation!)
And then the other corruption is the other side of the same coin. It’s what happens when people do apply this form of the “principle of charity”, and end up having conversations like some I’ve had recently, where I’ve been on the receiving end of this “charity”: I say something fairly straightforward, and my interlocutor, applying the principle of charity, and believing the literal or straightforward interpretation of my words to be evil (or something), mentally transforms my comments into something different (and, presumably, non-evil), and responds to that. Communication has not taken place; my words have not been heard.
There are other corruptions, too, more subtle ones (examples of which I’d have to take some time to hunt for), but these are more than bad enough!
Thanks for this. Sorry it’s taken me so long to reply here, didn’t mean to let this conversation hang for so long. I completely agree with about 99% of what you wrote here. The 1% I’ll hopefully address in the post I’m working on on this topic.