Understanding, Charity, and Interpretation

To determine whether one disagrees with somebody, one must have a sound understanding of what that person is saying. But it is sometimes difficult to distinguish cases of misunderstanding others from cases of substantive disagreement. One can best resolve that quandary by making every effort to understand accurately, and that requires construing what the other person says as charitably as possible. But such charity is more complicated than often recognized, since it applies in several ways: in respect of how others use individual words, what assertions they make, and what inferences they regard as acceptable. And applying charity must rely on how one sees the relevant things; charity is unavoidably by one’s own lights. An additional type of charity applies to the background explanatory pictures that sometimes figure in what people say. Construing in respect of one factor can affect how we construe in respect of another. So tradeoffs in how one construes the several factors are sometimes necessary, which can even lead to equally good alternative construals. Charitable construal of our own thoughts also occurs, often unconsciously, in resolving difficulties and, more generally, in guiding and regulating our thought processes.