Abstract

Forensic, dialectic, or scientific discourse cannot induce the desire to create novel beliefs, but deliberative discourse—a procedure for determining rules for future actions for which the interlocutors as yet have no determined rules—may induce such desire when interlocutors accept what Donald Davidson has called "the rule of charity," the rule that interlocutors must assume that what their counterparts say is mostly true. The need, and therefore the desire, for new belief emerges only once the possibility of resolving the problem using currently held beliefs exhausts and the need to reconceive the original problem presents itself.