What is principle of charity?

Principle of charity is a concept in personal epistemology: Before resolving a contradiction make the strongest possible case for each side.

Example: Your team is deadlocked over whether to build a custom internal tool or adopt an off-the-shelf SaaS product. You favor building in-house. Before you argue your case, you force yourself to write the strongest possible argument for the SaaS option — not a caricature of it, but the version its most thoughtful advocate would make. You include the total cost of maintenance, the opportunity cost of engineering hours, the vendor's domain expertise you cannot replicate, and the speed advantage of shipping next week instead of next quarter. When you read it back, something shifts. You realize the SaaS case is stronger than you thought — not because you changed your mind, but because the argument you were planning to rebut was a weak version you had unconsciously constructed. Your original 'refutation' would have knocked down a straw man. Now you have to engage the real argument. And the real argument, it turns out, reveals a variable you had not considered: the maintenance burden of custom tooling compounds over years, while the SaaS cost remains flat. Your final recommendation is neither 'build' nor 'buy' — it is a hybrid approach that neither side would have reached without being forced to confront the strongest version of its opposition.

This concept is part of Phase 19 (Contradiction Resolution) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for contradiction resolution.