Donald Davidson e a caridade interpretativa

There is rarely an exact one-to-one correspondence or translation between the meanings of two speakers. To communicate effectively we must continually adjust our own "truth-theories" to acommodate the perspective of the other speaker. Davidson argues that all interlocutors start from a "prior theory" that cosntitutes their view of the world. In any speech act the participants implicitly assume that there is a shared agreement on beliefs and interpretations, that their "prior theories" are in accord. When speakers encounter disagreement, they adopt a "passing theory" as a way of adjusting their assumptions to the new perspective as to maximize agreement. Davidson's term for this is "interpretative charity".

Pam Morris, Realism, London, Routledge