| Residential College | false |
| Status | 已發表Published |
| Charitable Interpretation and Self-Understanding | |
BENJAMIN IAN WINOKUR 
| |
| 2024-12-20 | |
| Size of Audience | 15 |
| Type of Speaker | Invited Lecturer |
| Abstract | Donald Davidson argued that a certain principle of charity necessarily governs our interpretive activities: there is just no way to interpret one another without identifying widespread rationality among one another’s attitudes. This implies that successful interpretation culminates in understanding one another, for it culminates in seeing one another’s attitudes as by and large reasonable to their possessors, hence not as brute psychological facts to which their possessors hold no evaluative stance. And yet Davidson also argued that interpreters are not generally in the position of having to interpret their own meanings or attitudes. Granting this, how does self-understanding arise? In other words, how do agents learn to see their own attitudes as by and large reasonable, if not by engaging in charitable self-interpretation? After arguing that self-understanding is not easily explained by Davidson’s account of the “first-person authority” with which agents typically ascribe attitudes to themselves, I argue that a better approach takes its cue from certain contemporary explanations of self-knowledge. More specifically, I argue that there are some ways of gaining self-knowledge that do not require self-interpretation and that deliver self-understanding at the very same time. These, I conclude, are the best places to look for a satisfying theory of self-understanding. |
| Keyword | Charity First-person Authority Interpretation Self-knowledge Self-understanding |
| URL | View the original |
| Conference Date | December 20th 2024 |
| Conference Place | Zoom |
| Funding Project | Knowing and Expressing Ourselves |
| The Source to Article | https://principleofcharity.weebly.com/abstracts.html |
| Document Type | Presentation |
| Collection | DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES |
| Corresponding Author | BENJAMIN IAN WINOKUR |
| Affiliation | University of Macau |
| First Author Affilication | University of Macau |
| Recommended Citation GB/T 7714 | BENJAMIN IAN WINOKUR. Charitable Interpretation and Self-Understanding, December 20th 2024. |
| Files in This Item: | Download All | |||||
| File Name/Size | Publications | Version | Access | License | ||
| (Topoi) Charitable I（3169KB） | 演讲报告 | 开放获取 | CC BY-NC-SA | View Download | ||
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