the.com/principle of charity

means A rule of reasoning that says you should interpret someone's argument in its most rational, coherent form before you critique it, rather than attacking a weaker version you can beat more easily.

from Rooted in 20th-century philosophy of language and logic, where thinkers wrestling with translation and interpretation (notably in debates around figures like Willard Quine and later Donald Davidson) argued that to make sense of anyone's statements at all, you must first assume they're mostly rational and consistent — otherwise translation and understanding collapse entirely. The term migrated from technical philosophy of interpretation into everyday argument and debate, where it now names the simple discipline of answering the best version of what someone meant, not the sloppiest.