El próximo martes 16 de junio, a las 12:30, en la sala de Juntas de Filosofía, tendrá lugar una nueva sesión del seminario TeC-FiloLab. En esta ocasión nos acompañará Marcin Lewiński, de la Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Abajo tenéis el título y el resumen de su charla, así como una breve nota biográfica.
Title: Unethical charity in interpretation
Abstract: The talk discusses two “un-ethical” senses of the Principle of Charity (PC) as used in argumentation theory. In the discipline, PC is a methodical guideline to adopt the strongest possible reconstruction of an argument, rather than some other plausible but weaker or flawed version of it. While it might sound as simple as that, the principle is far from being straightforward, as attested by the particularly lively debate around it, both in argumentation theory (Stevens, ed. 2025; Lewiński 2026) and in the philosophy of language (Abreu et el., ed. 2025).
In this talk, I first caution that ethically driven takes on charity developed in philosophy and argumentation theory (Vandervelde 2021; Pruś & Sikora 2023; Lockard 2025) run the risk of generating or perpetuating ethically dubious consequences; notably, a patronizing relation between the charity giver and taker and a blanket immunity to criticism by the (possibly strategic) charity taker. In this sense, “un-ethical” means ethically wrong, immoral. To attenuate for such perils of “toxic charity” (Stevens 2025), I will, second, re-examine the link between the philosophical and argumentation theoretic takes on charity to argue for an understanding of the PC that has nothing to do with ethical concerns. So conceived, the PC is, rather, a conceptual requirement to intelligibly interpret language and argumentation in the first place. (As Donald Davidson said in an interview about his prominent account of the principle of charity: “it’s not a matter of being kind to people; it’s the condition for understanding them at all.”) In this sense, “un-ethical” means irrelevant to ethics.
Finally, however, I will attempt to show that it’s precisely the unethical charity (in the second sense) that paves the way for otherwise ethical—that is: free, fair, and egalitarian—practices of argumentation.
Bio: Marcin Lewiński is Associate Professor at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy, NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal. He specializes in the philosophy of language and philosophy of argument, employing conceptual analysis to study public controversies over issues such as environment, migration, or social exclusion. His recent work includes papers on «illocutionary pluralism» (Synthese, 2021) and «the concept of argument» (Argumentation, 2025), and a monograph (coauthored with Mark Aakhus), Argumentation in Complex Communication: Managing Disagreement in a Polylogue (2023), published by the Cambridge UniversityThe talk discusses two “un-ethical” senses of the Principle of Charity (PC) as used in argumentation theory. In the discipline, PC is a methodical guideline to adopt the strongest possible reconstruction of an argument, rather than some other plausible but weaker or flawed version of it. While it might sound as simple as that, the principle is far from being straightforward, as attested by the particularly lively debate around it, both in argumentation theory (Stevens, ed. 2025; Lewiński 2026) and in the philosophy of language (Abreu et el., ed. 2025).