Principle of charity trades off epistemic rationality
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this, but the principle of charity entails not naively believing one’s first order guess of what one thinks the other person means and instead using motivated thinking in an attempt to somewhat counteract one’s biases such as one’s desire to win an argument. Fighting bias with bias is obviously problematic, but I wouldn’t describe it as trading away epistemic rationality.
An improved version of the technique is LCPW
As you said ”...importantly don’t need to assume that it’s what they really mean...it’s useful to keep separate mental buckets for these ideas, and very important to avoid conflating them.” The principle of charity is useful for reconstructing what was really meant, unlike LCPW, so each has an advantage over the other, and “improved” is not apt..
The principle of charity is useful for reconstructing what was really meant, unlike LCPW
Agreed that LCPW is not directly useful this way. On the other hand, if what you want is correct understanding of a question, it doesn’t matter what anyone really thought originally, only what is the answer; or for arguments, not what were the original arguments, but what are the actually important considerations. There is a failure mode in disagreements where opponents start arguing about what they really meant, finding ground for the verbal fight unrelated to the original topic, preventing useful progress.
If taken as a counter-bias against tendency to assume a less reasonable position than should be expected, principle of charity can somewhat help, but then there are better third alternatives to this technique that don’t share its glaring anti-epistemic flaws. For example, you search harder for possible reasonable interpretations, to make sure they are available for consideration, but retain expected bad interpretations in the distribution of possible intended meanings.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this, but the principle of charity entails not naively believing one’s first order guess of what one thinks the other person means and instead using motivated thinking in an attempt to somewhat counteract one’s biases such as one’s desire to win an argument. Fighting bias with bias is obviously problematic, but I wouldn’t describe it as trading away epistemic rationality.
As you said ”...importantly don’t need to assume that it’s what they really mean...it’s useful to keep separate mental buckets for these ideas, and very important to avoid conflating them.” The principle of charity is useful for reconstructing what was really meant, unlike LCPW, so each has an advantage over the other, and “improved” is not apt..
Agreed that LCPW is not directly useful this way. On the other hand, if what you want is correct understanding of a question, it doesn’t matter what anyone really thought originally, only what is the answer; or for arguments, not what were the original arguments, but what are the actually important considerations. There is a failure mode in disagreements where opponents start arguing about what they really meant, finding ground for the verbal fight unrelated to the original topic, preventing useful progress.
If taken as a counter-bias against tendency to assume a less reasonable position than should be expected, principle of charity can somewhat help, but then there are better third alternatives to this technique that don’t share its glaring anti-epistemic flaws. For example, you search harder for possible reasonable interpretations, to make sure they are available for consideration, but retain expected bad interpretations in the distribution of possible intended meanings.