You cannot understand someone without assuming they are mostly right
How do you interpret someone speaking an unknown language? Philosopher Donald Davidson argued that communication relies on the "principle of charity." To make sense of another person's words, you must start from the premise that most of their beliefs about the world are rational and true. Translation cannot even begin by treating a speaker as thoroughly mistaken, because identifying someone's specific errors requires an immense background of shared, accurate beliefs about reality.
The Mystery of the Radical Interpreter
Imagine arriving in a community whose language shares no roots, texts, or historical contact with your own. There is no bilingual dictionary, no shared third language, and no teacher available to explain the rules. You watch a speaker point toward a clearing where a rabbit suddenly scurries by, and the speaker utters a single unfamiliar phrase. You face a foundational puzzle in philosophy: how does one begin to match unknown sounds with genuine human thoughts?
This scenario, known as radical translation, was famously framed by philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. Quine pointed out that the native utterance could mean many things: it might name the animal itself, or refer to an isolated part of it like an ear, or identify a fleeting temporal slice of the rabbit's life, or even mean something abstract like the recurrence of rabbit-hood. To make any headway, an outside observer cannot simply match symbols one-to-one; they must make sweeping baseline assumptions about how the speaker perceives and responds to the surrounding world.
The Tangle of Belief and Meaning
Philosopher Donald Davidson took Quine's puzzle a step further, expanding it from an exotic anthropological exercise into a model for all everyday communication, a process he called radical interpretation. Davidson recognized that whenever we interpret someone else, we are always simultaneously trying to solve two unknowns: what the person believes and what their words mean.
The difficulty is that meaning and belief are tightly bound together. If a person looks directly at a domestic cat and asserts that it is an alien spacecraft, an interpreter faces a choice. Does the speaker possess a bizarre, false belief about household pets, or do they simply use the words to mean something ordinary, such as a feline? You cannot deduce what someone means by their words without already knowing what they believe, yet you cannot know what they believe without understanding what their words mean. To resolve this standoff, an interpreter has to hold one of the two variables steady.