Principle of charity
Thomas Aquinas maintained that “humility necessarily accompanies charity” (quoted in Overmyer, 2015, p. 658). Nonetheless, the sense in which charity is invoked in argumentation may initially seem somewhat distant from humility.
As with the ad verecundiam, it is possible to precisely date the inception of the “principle of charity”: it originates in an otherwise obscure article by the philosopher Neil Wilson, from which it was swiftly raised to much greater fame by WV O. Quine.1 For Wilson, the principle of charity requires that we favor that interpretation of a word “which will make the largest possible number of [the speaker's] statements true” (Wilson, 1959, p. 532). Quine applies it to a somewhat broader purpose, as embodying the “common sense” that “one's interlocutor's silliness, beyond a certain point, is less likely than bad translation” (Quine, 1960, p. 59). In the hands of Donald Davidson, the principle of charity was to become a major methodological maxim: one that “counsels us quite generally to prefer theories of interpretation that minimize disagreement” (Davidson, 1984, p. xvii).Unsurprisingly, the attention paid to the principle of charity in the philosophy of language soon crossed over into logic. In a useful survey, the argumentation theorist Ralph Johnson traces the earliest appeal to a principle of charity in a logic textbook to three works published in the mid-1970s. (I have been unable to find any earlier.) However, as Johnson complains, these three works already employ the principle in distinct ways. For Stephen Thomas, charity mandates that we read a passage as non-argumentative rather than ascribe bad reasoning to its author (Thomas, 1973, p. 9). Robert Baum applies the principle to the evaluation of enthymemes, and construes it as requiring us “to add whatever premises are needed to make the argument as good as possible” (Baum, 1975, p.
15). Michael Scriven offers a much more sweeping definition. For him, the “Principle of Charity requires that we make the best, rather than the worst, possible interpretation of the material we're studying” (Scriven, 1976, p. 71). He glosses this in explicitly ethical terms, as requiring fairness or justice in criticism.Johnson's own definition hews closest to Scriven: “The Principle of Charity which governs all levels of argument analysis is that the critic should provide the best possible interpretation of the material under consideration” (Johnson, 1984, p. 5). He moderates this definition with a restriction on the circumstances in which the critic is so obligated:
the heavy artillery of argument analysis, monitored by the requirements of the Principle of Charity, is to be pressed into service only when one confronts (i) a fully expressed argument (ii) from a serious arguer (iii) on a serious matter.
(Johnson, 1984, p. 8)
The critical thinking theorist Richard Paul, to whose work we will shortly turn, proposes a similar definition to Johnson's, but makes the connection to humility explicit:
We must feel obliged to hear [views we oppose] in their strongest form to ensure that we do not condemn them out of our own ignorance and bias.At this point we come full circle back to where we began: the need for intellectual humility.
(Paul, 2000, p. 170)
Here Paul explicitly invokes humility in implicit support of a thesis familiar from Mill's On Liberty: “there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides: it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices” (Mill, 1977, p. 257). And, if we should listen to the other side, we should listen to them at their best.
As with the ad verecundiam, the principle of charity may be understood as a mean between complementary vices, here with respect to interpretation of another's arguments rather than acceptance of their premisses.The vice of deficiency may take the form of wilfully obtuse misinterpretation, as in the straw man fallacy; the vice of excess what Scott Aikin and John Casey have characterized as “a little noticed variety of straw man—the distortion which results in being overly charitable to someone's argument, or, as we shall call it, the iron man” (Aikin and Casey, 2016, p. 432). Once again we have uncovered an unfamiliar fallacy dual to a more familiar fallacy. In Kidd's terms, these extremes may also be seen as manifesting the under- or over-regulation of intellectual confidence, whether arrogantly twisting an argument into a straw man or obsequiously striving to reinterpret it as an iron man.Thereby each exhibits a failure of humility.
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