Principle of Charity and Some Obvious Ways a Person Could be Stupid
Recently, I was thinking about philosophical principles in the context of argumentation and communication. Very loosely, a principle is a guide for behavior or evaluation. Think about the principle of parsimony when comparing two explanatory models of a natural phenomenon; the simplest one should be selected, all else equal (both have equally sufficient explanatory power but their structures differ). This seems like a reasonable rule to follow; if one explanation requires additional assumptions or a more complex explanatory structure, we gravitate towards the simpler one. These principles are very rough Heuristics that are not guaranteed to lead you to the correct answer. Nevertheless, we use them all of the time without even explicitly acknowledging them. Some principles seem to be innate. We typically do not have to think about the Cooperative Principle when engaging in communication with someone: Accordingly, the cooperative principle is divided into Grice's four maxims of