ABSTRACT
All too often, we explain political beliefs by ascribing them to irrational motives, biases, or forces. This irrationalist form of explanation generates uncharitable interpretations of others’ political beliefs: interpretations that fail to acknowledge the possibility that others have rational, although perhaps mistaken, grounds for their beliefs. Recognizing that between true beliefs and irrational ones is a middle ground, the ground of mistake, requires that we refrain from attributing our own knowledge (or putative knowledge) to others, as such attributions make it difficult to see how others’ ignorance may make it reasonable for them to have merely mistaken beliefs that look irrational to us. Such knowledge attributions treat our own knowledge as knowledge of the self-evident truth, precluding the possibility that those who disagree with us are simply ignorant of the truth rather than culpably or unaccountably “ignoring” it. Intellectual charity requires us to eschew the naïvely realistic assumption that human knowledge is self-evident rather than being mediated by fallible processes of information gathering, interpretation, and communication—which may produce mistaken, yet rational, beliefs.
