Nicolas Cuevas-Alvear

This paper discusses the scope and limits of the Principle of Charity (PC) in dialectic and argumentation from a Davidsonian perspective. On the one hand, some scholars have proposed that PC is insufficient for explaining the complexities of dialogues and then have suggested extending PC into a Dialectical Principle of Charity (DPC). On the other hand, some scholars have proposed that PC should not be considered necessary because it leads to the “paradox of charity” in critical discussion. They have then proposed limiting PC use in argumentation. Our paper addresses the problems stated by Pruś and Sikora (2023) about the rigidness of the Principle, which assumes the interpreter’s view is true and the reduction of the possibility for rational confrontation of beliefs, and the paradox of charity in argumentation stated by Lewiński (2012) according to which charity is incapable helping us decide between opposite positions, as those we find in critical dialogues. We propose that PC is both a necessary condition for argumentation and a dynamic method for the dialectical process. Although we find both roles in Davidson’s works on interpretation (Sect. 2), we want to make explicit their significant contributions to dialectic and argumentation, which are not explicit in his works and are little recognized and much polemicized among theorists of these fields. On the positive side, our proposal aims to nourish Pruś’ and Sikora’s Dialectical Principle of Charity (DPC) by adding a mechanism to track changes at sentential, propositional, and subpropositional levels (Sect. 3) and to clarify how, although PC is not sufficient for the analyst to choose between opposite theses in critical discussion, it is a necessary condition for meaningful disagreement, so it is neither optional nor a mere strategic device among others we can use in argumentation (Sect. 4).

Sellars’ and Davidson’s conceptions of self-knowledge have a common ground in their rejection of the given. Both offer arguments against the idea that raw sensations can justify corresponding introspective judgments and thus challenge core observational models. Although it is widely acknowledged that both philosophers reject the aforementioned conception of introspection, their shared perspectives on self-knowledge, resulting from this critique, are seldom explored. In fact, there is a noticeable disparity between Davidson’s impact on contemporary debates concerning self-knowledge, particularly within the rationalist tradition, and Sellars’ relatively limited recognition in this discussion. This chapter aims to address these gaps. The chapter begins by explaining Sellars’ and Davidson’s criticisms of the given and how they constitute arguments against observational models of self-knowledge. It then proceeds to reconstruct their alternative conceptions of self-knowledge. We argue that the primary difference between the two authors concerns their conceptions of self-knowledge as an epistemic achievement. Whereas Davidson's view is typically understood as a non-epistemic explanation, Sellars seems to offer resources for a genuinely epistemic understanding of self-knowledge, free from any commitments to the given, if developed within an externalist framework.