A solution to Davidson's paradox of irrationality

Abstract

The principle of charity is part of an attempt to codify the methodology of translation (or interpretation). Each of the various versions of the principle methodologically constrain the translator to find the speakers of the source-language (i.e., of the language being interpreted) to be rational speakers of truth. Donald Davidson is one of the foremost proponents of the principle of charity in interpreting both languages and actions. In this paper I present a critical exposition of Davidson's formulation of that principle. I show that it needlessly takes all attributions of irrationality to be paradoxical and evidence against the sponsoring interpretive scheme. Davidson believes that the need for a general principle of charity becomes evident when one considers how investigators are to provide a theory of meaning for a foreign language.1 All they have to go on is assent to and dissent from (and utterances of) sentences. If, on that basis, source-language and target-language sentences alike in truth conditions could be matched, then the results might provide the basis for isolating recurrent parts of the source-language and assigning to them systematic contributions to the truth-conditions of sentences containing them. Such assignments would result in the ability to frame further new source-language sentences that could be paired with target-language sentences taken to have the same truth-conditions. These results could then be checked by the same methods that yielded the initial equivalences. After numerous such sequences, we should have arrived at a theory of the desired sort. The trick is to match sentences alike in truth-conditions on the basis of patterns of assent and dissent.