I think charity as a useful skill is more about aiming to comprehend unfamiliar frames than about understanding theories or arguments or truths, or preferences for someone being right. It’s about adopting a perceptual lens that puts particular priorities on paying attention to particular features of what’s going on, emphasizing those features when describing things, a cognitive dialect that may go unnoticed because a person talks using the same words as you do, but that’s not necessarily even mutually intelligible with your own thought (on some topics). It’s rarely useful to think in another’s cognitive dialect, but the skill can become necessary to understand what’s going on and to reply in such a way that you too would more likely be understood.
The use of word “charity” for this is unfortunate, as it’s no more charitable than learning a foreign tongue in order to communicate with its speakers, without expecting or demanding that they learn yours instead (or even worse, trying to hold a conversation without anyone attempting a proper translation). Of course, there is no obligation to publish texts in a foreign tongue, no obligation to make yourself intelligible to others who didn’t bother to learn the language you use. “Ideological Turing Test” is another related idea, but frames can be much smaller than ideologies, effective practice of charity must be nimble.
I think charity as a useful skill is more about aiming to comprehend unfamiliar frames than about understanding theories or arguments or truths, or preferences for someone being right. It’s about adopting a perceptual lens that puts particular priorities on paying attention to particular features of what’s going on, emphasizing those features when describing things, a cognitive dialect that may go unnoticed because a person talks using the same words as you do, but that’s not necessarily even mutually intelligible with your own thought (on some topics). It’s rarely useful to think in another’s cognitive dialect, but the skill can become necessary to understand what’s going on and to reply in such a way that you too would more likely be understood.
The use of word “charity” for this is unfortunate, as it’s no more charitable than learning a foreign tongue in order to communicate with its speakers, without expecting or demanding that they learn yours instead (or even worse, trying to hold a conversation without anyone attempting a proper translation). Of course, there is no obligation to publish texts in a foreign tongue, no obligation to make yourself intelligible to others who didn’t bother to learn the language you use. “Ideological Turing Test” is another related idea, but frames can be much smaller than ideologies, effective practice of charity must be nimble.