I think that in typical usage, “principle of charity” is conflating two things. On one hand, you have conversational skills like those described in this comment. Under this definition, saying that someone is failing to exercise the principle of charity is saying that they’re navigating a conversation poorly, doing less interpretative labor than they should be.
On the other hand, sometimes saying that someone is failing to exercise the principle of charity is a way of saying that they have such inaccurate priors that it’s interfering with their reading comprehension. Or that they’re a malicious liar who’s pretending to have poor reading comprehension.
Equivocating between these things is a way of allowing people who are failing to exercise the principle of charity (in the latter sense) to save face by only accusing them of the former. This is probably bad, though; norms against malicious misinterpretation don’t seem to be adequately enforced in practice, and this is probably a contributing factor.
I think that in typical usage, “principle of charity” is conflating two things. On one hand, you have conversational skills like those described in this comment. Under this definition, saying that someone is failing to exercise the principle of charity is saying that they’re navigating a conversation poorly, doing less interpretative labor than they should be.
On the other hand, sometimes saying that someone is failing to exercise the principle of charity is a way of saying that they have such inaccurate priors that it’s interfering with their reading comprehension. Or that they’re a malicious liar who’s pretending to have poor reading comprehension.
Equivocating between these things is a way of allowing people who are failing to exercise the principle of charity (in the latter sense) to save face by only accusing them of the former. This is probably bad, though; norms against malicious misinterpretation don’t seem to be adequately enforced in practice, and this is probably a contributing factor.