Learning from Others

I once believed that there are several naturally occurring isotopes of gold. When asked, “Are there several naturally occurring isotopes of gold?” either I would simply say, “Yes,” or, if I was in the mood to be more explicit, I would say, “There are several naturally occurring isotopes of gold.” But four years ago, while browsing through the Encyclopedia Britannica article titled “Gold”, I read the sentence “The element’s only naturally occurring isotope is gold-197.” I took the author’s words at face value—I took him to have asserted that the element’s only naturally occurring isotope is gold-197—and I accepted that the element’s only naturally occurring isotope is gold-197 solely because I trusted him. I thereby took myself to have learned from him that the element’s only naturally occurring isotope is gold-197. It ordinarily goes without saying that we can learn from others in this way—by taking their words at face value and accepting what they write or say solely because we trust them. C. A. J. Coady has recently argued that we can justify our trust in what others write or say by appealing to Donald Davidson’s principle of charity, which exhorts us to interpret another speaker’s words in such a way that under the assigned interpretation, what the speaker asserts is true by our own lights. Against this, I will argue that if Davidson’s principle of charity is a constraint on correctly interpreting what others write or say, then our ordinary impression that we can learn from others by taking their words at face value and accepting what they write or say is an illusion created by habitual but unjustified misinterpretations of their utterances. The reason is that in a large number of cases in which we take ourselves to be learning from others by accepting what they write or say, what we take them to write or say, given ~what Davidson sees as! our tacit interpretations of what we read or hear, is not true by NOÛS 36:4 ~2002! 525–549