Charity and false beliefs

What Charity does is to assume agreement (in beliefs). That by itself does not automatically assume truth (of those beliefs), it does so only in conjunction with the assumption that we ourselves have the right beliefs. And there is the conundrum: we know that some of our beliefs are false, but we do no know which these are (otherwise we would not hold them). So indirectly we will assume that others, even if we assume they agree with us, will not be right all the time, but for the same reason that we can not attribute false beliefs to ourselves without giving them up, we can not attribute false beliefs to other without giving up the assumption of agreement. 

Martin Stokhof
from: Interpretation
date: fall 2008