« Si un lion... »

Bazin, Jean

Philosophia Scientiae, L’usage anthropologique du principe de charité, Tome 6 (2002) no. 2, pp. 127-146

Résumé

The philosophical language game of radical translation, which consists of splitting the atoms of linguistic behavior in a quasi-experimental way, amounts to the construction of a non-situation wherein one renders oneself incapable of understanding the uses of language. The debate needs to be reoriented: we need to shift the focus from the problem of meaning (or the pairs meaning/translation and meaning/belief) to accounting for action. If there is charity, it consists not so much in maximizing one's agreement with the other as in supposing that one must be able to reestablish, for any statement, all of the social procedures involved in its use. Interpreting an action or a series of actions, including a speech act, entails successfully placing it within a context and a plausible scenario and supplying a satisfactory description which we can use to act in the same way. It is by supposing that those whom we observe, if they are human, do not act at random, but according to certain rules, that we can learn to act like them. This is not a matter of a principle, but of work.