Charity and context

«Though truth and falsehood bee Neare twins, yet truth a little older is.» I Much of the contribution of contemporary philosophy to the problem of interpretation in anthropology is not a contribution to anthropology, but to what might be called a priori anthropology (Cooper 1986). This is an armchair speculation, far from the field, about the general requirements of the interpretation of beliefs and other intentional states of creatures understood in a very abstract way, outside their social and psychological context. The philosopher's motto that interpretation (or translation) "begins at home" and that the problems of interpretation are the same for people inside our culture and for people outside this culture serves here as a safeguard against all temptations to tie the ascription of psychological contents to people to the various circumstances of their social life. Thus interpretation, in the philosopher's sense, is from the outset divorced from context, in the sense of the word "context" which presumably interests the anthropologist, especially in this conference. So why bother consider the speculations of philosophers in this domain? Because although interpretation is always interpretation "within" and "relative to" a context, interpretation is interpretation nevertheless, and although the claim that interpretation is relative to a context seems to be almost an analytical truth, or a truism, we still do not know exactly what it means. The present paper falls squarely, I am afraid, within the range of a priori anthropology, but I hope that it will be able to raise some of the issues about the context sensitivity of interpretation that might interest anthropologists. My topic concerns the range of a principle which has been held to be a necessary requirement of the interpretation of psychological contents: the so