Pedro Abreu

Even though the principle of charity is often invoked in contemporary discussions in the philosophy of language and mind, it is rarely the primary topic of investigation. This special issue revisits questions about the nature, status, scope, and justification of the principle; furthermore, it explores how reflection on these questions helps address a wide range of topics. The contributions are divided into two broad themes. The first theme is an investigation of the grounds and limits of the role of the principle of charity in our engagements with others. What, if anything, makes it the case that understanding others requires counting them right in most matters? The second set of contributions concerns not the justification of the principle of charity but its consequences. The contributors explore how the principle might enable us to tackle further questions and make progress on other fronts, not only concerning language, mind, and knowledge, but also concerning reasons, actions, and values.

This paper examines the limits of interpretation holism—the view that interpretation should uncover unified, coherent systems of meaning—particularly when confronted with disordered or conflicting interpretive bases. While interpretation holism is a crucial component of adopting the principle of charity, its applicability becomes questionable when an agent’s mind and actions exhibit significant incoherence and internal tension. The paper distinguishes between uneven conflicts, where holistic interpretation remains viable, and even conflicts, where equally strong but incompatible interpretive forces resist unification. In the latter cases, a revised interpretive strategy is required. I introduce the notion of fragment meaning and its associated apparatus to accommodate the interpretation of non-unifiable minds without distorting their complexity. Rather than rejecting holism or charity, these concepts extend their spirit into more challenging interpretive contexts, suggesting that charity may sometimes lie not in insisting on unity, but in recognizing and portraying fragmentation.

In this paper we reflect on the role of retraction in determining the verbal or non-verbal nature of disputes. Drawing on the recent philosophical discussion on the topic, we examine the difficulties in distinguishing the relevant type of retraction involved in numerous cases and, accordingly, in determining the verbal or non-verbal nature of the antecedent dispute. We advance this discussion by identifying a largely unacknowledged form of retraction—verbal retraction—and by analyzing its consequences in disagreement-driven argumentative disputes. We point out a philosophically significant, limiting case where retraction, while prima facie verbal, effectively produces clear changes at the object-level perspective and, as such, should be counted as non-verbal. Altogether, we propose a dynamic approach to disputes, which affirms their indeterminate nature (verbal or non-verbal) based on the ever-present possibility of new conversational moves retroactively redefining the nature of the original dispute. Retraction is a specimen of such a redefining move that merits further scrutiny.

I return to Davidson’s “anti-conventionalism” papers to assess his famous arguments against the sufficiency and necessity of conventions for successful linguistic communication. Davidson goes beyond the common contention that the basic conventional layer of meaning, one that is secured by interlocutors’ shared competence in their common language, must often be supplemented in rich and inventive ways. First, he maintains that linguistic understanding is never exclusively a matter of mere decoding, but always an interpretative task that demands constant additional attention to the indeterminately various cues and clues available. More radically still, Davidson denies that linguistic conventions are even needed. In particular, he argues against the fairly consensual thesis there is some essential element of conventionality in literal meaning. This still represents a very distinctive contribution to the persistent and tumultuous discussion over the relative natures and limits of semantics and pragmatics. I maintain that Davidson is only partially right in his claims. I agree with him about the general insufficiency of conventions for linguistic communication. I develop an argument supporting the thesis that genuine pursuit of linguistic understanding can never take the form of uncritical conformity to a fixed norm. I am also convinced that Davidson is right about the occasional dispensability of conventions. Often enough, as Davidson’s examples show, literal meanings are improvised on the go - that is, interlocutors manage to coordinate on the meaning of some exchanged expression without the benefit of a shared convention governing that use. I reject, however, general non-necessity. I consider in some detail Davidson’s argument from radical interpretation and conclude that it fails.

This paper raises a new form of speaker error objection to the analysis of disputes as metalinguistic negotiations in cases in which disputants reject that analysis. It focuses on an obvious but underexplored form of speaker error: speakers’ misattribution of contents both to others and to themselves. It argues that the analyses of disputes that posit this type of speaker error are uncharitable in three different ways: first, by portraying speakers as mistaken interpreters of their interlocutors; second, by portraying speakers as uncharitable interpreters of their interlocutors; third, by portraying speakers who retract their claims as mistaken interpreters of their own prior utterances. Taken together, these unfavorable consequences weigh significantly against the plausibility of this type of analysis for the cases in question.