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    Carmelics

    A reasoning platform. Break down any belief into clear reasons, explore both sides, and weigh the evidence honestly.

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Belief content and sentence meaning must be defined jointly in terms of a principle of charity — whatever assignment maximizes the truth of an agent's beliefs and utterances

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Radical charity produces systematic distortion: agents in radically different conceptual schemes may hold mostly false beliefs by design (Stich 1990).
      ?

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    • 2.If a belief system is massively false, maximizing truth assignments misidentifies content rather than revealing it, inverting the explanatory order.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Kripke and Putnam show that reference is fixed by causal-historical chains, not by truth-maximizing interpretation of the agent's total belief set.
      ?

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    • 2.Since meaning is partly constituted by mind-external factors independent of belief truth-values, charity cannot serve as the joint definitional ground Davidson requires.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Belief content and sentence meaning cannot be defined independently of one another
      ?

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    • 2.A third independent fact is needed to ground the joint definition of belief and meaning
      ?

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    • 3.The fact that beliefs and meanings must maximize the truth of an agent's beliefs and utterances is available as such an independent third fact
      ?

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    Strongest counterpoint
    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.