 In his later writings on charity (2001, p. 196), Davidson recognized its ambiguities, noting that he previously tended to construe it in terms of “maximizing” agreement in belief and that a more perspicuous statement of what he had in mind all along is that agreement in beliefs should be “optimized.” Rather than the “most” agreement, we need the “right sort” of agreement that enables understanding of others. We should try to reach agreement “as far as possible, subject to considerations of simplicity, hunches about the effects of social conditioning, and of course our common-sense, or scientific, knowledge of explicable error.” This very qualified formulation of charity amounts to the admission that the principle of charity itself needs interpretation and hence cannot be the ultimate standard for interpretation. Henry Richardson (1997) points out that interpreting a philosophical text requires taking account of the cognitive aims the authors had in writing what they did. Is it more charitable, Richardson asks, for a translator of Machiavelli’s The Prince to resolve ambiguities and seek to maximize agreement between Machiavelli and ourselves? Or is it more charitable to set him out as intentionally provocative and deliberately cryptic? It should be unsurprising that charity cannot fulfill its promise as a firm and clear guide to interpretation. Charity bids us to render others like “us,” but “we” are already a diverse group who believe and want and value somewhat different things. That is, the range of the intelligibly human already embraces diversity (think of how impoverished our models of understanding would be if we could only rely on our individual selves). See Mou (2006) for a range of articles on the way that Davidson’s interpretive principle and other aspects of his philosophy relate to Chinese philosophy.