Abstract
It is well known that according to Davidson, it follows from the conditions of possibility of radical interpretation that the notion of belief is intrinsically truthful, in the sense that an agent can only have beliefs provided that most of them are true and coherent. In this paper, I offer some reasons to doubt that this thesis of the truthfulness of belief actually follows from the principles governing radical interpretation, unless the thesis is understood in a way that considerably trivializes it. If what I’m about to suggest is correct, I will have shown that one of the most popular objection to Davidson’s program is in fact ungrounded; but I will also have provided some reasons to doubt the fruitfulness of such an enterprise.
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Notes
I am indebted to Martin Montminy for bringing this point to my attention.
It was Pacherie (1993: 71–72) who made me aware of this point.
This last contention is highly questionable, as I have noted in Laurier (1992a) where I attempted to show that what justifies, ultimately, the principle of charity is not that it is the only one that can lead to an interpretation, but rather that it leads to the interpretation that allows for the intentional explanation of the largest number of actions. The choice of the principle of charity thus rests, in the final analysis, on the requirement to treat others “as subjects” as often as possible.
Recall that these functions apply to sentences the interpreter does not yet understand, and whose values express the degree to which they are held-true or desired-true.
In Jeffrey’s theory (1983: 96–97), this set is defined by Bolker’s equivalence theorem. If (prob, des) determines a certain preference ordering, then so does the pair (PROB, DES), providing that: (1) PROB(X) = prob(X)(c des(X)+d) (2) DES(X) = (a des(X)+b)/(c des(X)+d) (3) ad-bc > 0 (4) c des(X) + d > 0, for every X in the preference order (5) c des(T) + d = 1, if T is a tautology.
It is worth noting that to reach this stage, it does not seem necessary that the interpreter uses his knowledge of the circumstances in which the agent prefers-true one sentence over another. It is sufficient that he knows which sentences are preferred-true over which.
We can also take this opportunity to add that this seems to show that those commentators who attribute a pragmatic conception of truth to Davidson are mistaken.
And to ask this is precisely to ask if interpretation must be based on a principle such as (6) rather than on one of the intermediary principles between (6) and (7).
But the philosophical discussion on this kind of situations goes back at least up to Pascal and James, and probably much further, and it is briefly mentioned in many textbooks of general epistemology.
Many thanks to Paul Bernier, François Lepage, Martin Montminy, Ronald de Sousa, Pierre Livet, Kevin Mulligan, Claude Panaccio and Michel Seymour for their comments on earlier drafts, and to Pierre Poirier for translating this paper from the French.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Laurier, D. (1999). On the Principle of Charity and the Sources of Indeterminacy. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_11
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