response 

On Adler On Charity 

Trudy Govier 
Trent University 

In "Why Be Charitable?", (lLN, iv.2, May, 1982) Jonathan 
Adler locates the Principle of Charity in the broad context 
of the epistemic goal of seeking truth. He says: 

If the study of informal logic is construed as within the 
theory of inquiry, then it should seek anlyses and evalua-
tions that bring us closer to the truth. Presumably this 
implies that we want to maximize truth-relevant or 
epistemically relevant considerations over pragmatic or 
ethical ones in defending certain approaches, rules, or 
principles. (p. 16) 

The Principle of Charity should be justified, at least as a first 
try, as significant for finding out whether the conclusion is 
correct, given the premises, rather than merely winning the 
argument. (p. 16) 

Adler's connection between charity and Popper's philo-
sophy of science is fascinating, and his emphasis on the 
oddity of making ethical and pragmatic values predo-
minate over cognitive ones raises fundamental issues. 
However, there are some real problems with his brief 
account. 

I am not sure what Adler means to include under the 
broad description "theoryof inquiry", but I shall assume-
taking a hint from his reference to Popper-that this 
would be the philosophy of science and epistemology. Let 
us take it that a primary and central task of informal logic is 
to develop a theory of argument. The theory of inquiry 
would be a normative theory including rules for seeking 
and evaluating evidence, for corroborating hypotheses, 
and for !;electing between competing theories. Adler 
supposes that informal logic should sit squarely within the 
theory of inquiry, and that such an approach may be able 
to provide a block to relativism and subjectivism. There 
are several problems with this over-riding assumption 
about informal logic and the theory of inquiry. First of all, 
in current philosophy of science there is by no means a 
consensus as to whether the road to relativism and/or 
subjectivism can be blocked. A substantial school, in-
spired by Kuhn and further radicalized under the influence 
of Feyerabend, contends that it is impossible to justify 
generally-applicable normative rules for the correct con-
duct of scientific inquiry. Also, it is not at all clear that the 

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theory of argument should be within the theory of inquiry. 
Topics in informal logic or-I would prefer to say-the 
theory of argument include: 

1. The nature of argument and its differentiation from 
explanation, narration, iIIustration ... The nature of the 
"rational support" for a claim which argument is sup-
posed to give and the 'how it came to be' of an 
explanation, the purely persuasive techniques of some 
advertising, and so on. 

2. The problem of missing premises. 
3. The question as to how many distinct types of argu-

ment there are. 
4. The question as to how many distinct standards of 

appraisal there are, so far as appraising the connection 
between premises and conclusions of arguments. 

5. The issue as to whether all such standards are formal, 
or can be made formal and, if not, as to how formal and 
non-formal standards are related. 

6. General questions regarding acceptability of premises; 
to what extent this is an audience-relative matter; why 
question-begging is a mark of argument inadequacy; 
whether, and in what sense, the premises of a good 
argument must be more certain than its conclusion. 

I n my view, the most notable feature of informal logic is its 
strong naturalism, which should put those experienced in 
teaching informal logic in a position of some privilege with 
respect to questions (3) and (4) here. I am suspicious of 
charity which is strong enough to undermine what I see as 
a healthy naturalistic bias in informal logic. Now if "theory 
of inquiry" includes epistemology and philosophy of 
science, and "informal logic" includes the topics listed 
above (and some others), it is just not clear that the latter 
is part of the former. I urge that it is not part of the former; 
it is more interpretive, more specific, higher order ... .lt is 
another subject If he wishes to preserve his claim that 
informal logic is partofthetheoryof inquiry,Adlerowes us 
an account of the whole and its part 

Having seen that Adler's overall framework is not as 
unproblematic as it might be, let us move more speci-
fically to the Principle of Charity itself. Following Johnson 
and Scriven, Adler again reports that the principle directs i 
the critic of an argument to "provide the best interpre-
tation of the material under consideration" and says that 
ideally, this principle would be justified as "significant for . 
finding out whether the conclusion is correct given the I 
premises". This may all sound terribly obvious and com- . 
pletely right-but if it does, it is only because some crucial i 
ambiguities are hiding beneath the surface. 

In an earlier note ("Uncharitable Thoughts about· 
Charity", ILN, iv.l, November, 1981), I urged that the 
apparently bland advice to seek the best interpretation of 
an argumentative passage may be taken in three different 
ways, as: 
PC1: Interpret the passage well. Do a good job of your 
interpretation by paying attention to context, ambiguities, 
notes of irony, nuances of meaning and so on. (Call this 
Truistic Charity.) 
PC2: Interpret the passage so as to get out of it the best 
argument you can. (Call this Strong Charity.) 
PC3: If several distinct interpretations of a passage are i 
equally licensed by the material which is actually stated, i 
work on that interpretation which represents the passage 
as giving the best of the several distinct arguments which it ~ 
might be said to express. (Call this Modest Charity.) I . 
personally would defend Modest Charity, butAdlerworks 
with Strong Charity: 



We want to formulate arguments at their best or greatest 
strength because that makes the evaluation a more 
"severe" test A more severe test-a stronger statement of 
the argument-is more likely to reveal falsity (failure of the 
line of reasoning) than a less severe one (weaker statement 
of the argument). (p. 16, emphasis mine.) 

In this defence of strong charity there is a crucial ambiguity 
of reference in "the argument". Adler takes it that you 
have an argument, and you then have the problem of 
whether to assess the weaker or the stronger statement of 
that argument. But actually, you have a piece of discourse, 
and you have the problem as to whether to interpret it as 
expressingA ·-which you could assess, or A··, or A···, and 
so on. 

Teaching informal logic brought this lesson home to me, 
and the learning experience wasn't pleasant First I thought 
my students were awfully slow at developing the skill of 
picking out premises and conclusions. Later I came to 
realize just how often even a bri~f and apparently prosaic 
piece of discourse can be taken as expressing several 
quite distinct arguments-depending on what we add 
and delete, what meanings we attribute to key terms, 
whether loose analogies are taken as really part of the 
argument, and so on. There isn't anyone and the same 
argument which has weaker and stronger versions; there is 
one piece of discourse which may be taken in various 
ways. Adler's defence of Charity completely hides this 
interpretive problem. But it shouldn't be hidden, es-
pecially not as the Principle of Charity is itself a principle 
of interpretation. The problem undermines Adler's defence 
of charity, for we can no longer insist that applying strong 
charity will give us the best estimate of whether "the 
conclusion is correct given these premises" (p. 16). The 
principle applies to the discourse itself, and yields the 
interpretation with "this" conclusion and "these" premises. 
There will not only be one estimate of the adequacy of 
these premises to support this condus'ion; there wlii 
frequently be several distinct premise-conclusion sets 
which may be extracted from a natural piece ot argu-
mentative discourse. Adler's defence of strong charity is 
inadequate because it has charity working at the wrong 
stage in argument appraisal. 

There are many different purposes which we may have 
in evaluating argumentative discourse. Sometimes our 
purpose is to reply as cogently and briefly as we can to an 
opponent. Sometimes it is to check the strength of 
reasons offered in support of something we already 
believe. Sometimes it is to check the legitimacy of our 
beliefs by examing grounds offered for competing beliefs. 
Sometimes it is to find the underlying assumptions and 
world view of a famous thinker. Sometimes it is to evaluate 
the truth of a single crucial statement, identified as the 
conclusion. I n this last case, if our interest is solely in 
whether this conclusion is true, the matter of how well the 
stated reasons happen to support it is secondary, and the 
rest of the" argument" could drop out as unimportant. We 
might drop out statements offered in support of the 
"conclusion" to replace them by more cogent and con-
vincing premises. Here strong charity is appropriate. But 
this is one kind of case. 

Toward the end of his article, Adler notes that "in 
normal day-to-day life, as in the classroom, truth is not 
such an overriding desideratum as in science ... one (non-
ideal) constraint we might place is to try to understand 
and evaluate arguments within the context and terms in 
which they are presented" (p. 16). In terms of Adler's 

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over-riding desire to making epistemic goals predominate 
over moral and pragmatic ones, this is certainly a very 
significant qualification. For we see him allowing that for 
practical reasons (i.e., pragmatic reasons), the scope of 
what are (in his view) the appropriate cognitive values will 
be somewhat restricted. More fundamentally, however, I 
would wish to question Adler's view that understanding 
discourse in its own terms and context is a compromise, 
an appraisal strategy which one could resort to for 
practical reasons, but which is less than ideal. 

Discourse is another person's discourse. It provides 
access to the theories and reasonings of another mind-
sometimes to those of another world view, another 
culture, or another time. Against proponents of strong 
charity, I would urge that it is in the interests of self-
development and human understanding that we seek to 
understand other people's ideas as they put these ideas 
forward. To the extent that we are interested in how other 
people actually think and what they have to say, strong 
charity will not serve us well in interpretation. For it directs 
us to mold the discourse of others in the light of our own 
preconceptions as to what a good argument is, what is 

well-ordered, and so on. This is a license for projecting 
one's own mind into the discourse of other minds. Like 
some other forms of charity, strong interpretive charity 
will frequently be manipulative and condescending. 

Several issues back, David Hitchcock wrote in the 
Newsletter that the primary purpose of evaluating argu-
ments was to determine whether or not the conclusion of 
the argument was true. [1] Adler's view on this matter is 
similar to Hitchcock's although he makes the qualification 
of "true" as "conclusion is correct (sic) given the premises" 
(p. 16). In what sense is TRUTH the primary goal in 
argument appraisal? Obviously truth is our over-riding goal 
in analyzing Smith's argument on nuclear arms if the truth 
we are looking for is a truth about Smith's argument on 
nuclear arms (whether it has two conclusions or one, 
whether it is ad hominem and fallacious, whether any 
stated premises are irrelevent to the conclusion, etc.). But 
this is not what is at issue. What HitchcockandAdler seem 
to be working with is a model on which the point of 
appraising Smith's argument on nuclear arms is to find out 
the truth about nuclear arms. But unless Smith is some-
body pretty special, examining his argument is going to be 
an indirect and inefficient route to discovering the truth 
about nuclear arms! Determining the truth of the con-
clusion is not typically the over-riding goal of argument 
analysis, and there seems no good reason to found our 
interpretive principles on the belief that this kind of truth-
seeking comes first and the understanding of what other 
people actually have to say comes second. 

Note 

[1] Editors' Note: Cf. ILN, iii.2 (March 1981), p. 7 in 
"Deduction, Induction and Conduction", pp. 7-15. We 
believe the passage that Govier refers to is the following 
one: 

Usually our purpose in appraising an argun:ent is to c~me 
to a decision about whether to accept Its conclUSion. 

We take it that Govier'S point here does not hinge upon 
emphasizing truth over some other value, but that. sh.e 
holds that the primary goal of argument analYSIS IS 
typically not to determine the truth or the acceptability of 

the argument's conclusion .•