Charles Taylor

Meaning, Morals and Modernity

Nicholas H. Smith

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745615769, 9780745615752
• eBook ISBN: 9780745668598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is a key figure in contemporary debates about the self and the problems of modernity.

This book provides a comprehensive, critical account of Taylor's work. It succinctly reconstructs the ambitious philosophical project that unifies Taylor's diverse writings. And it examines in detail Taylor's specific claims about the structure of the human sciences; the link between identity, language, and moral values; democracy and multiculturalism; and the conflict between secular and non-secular spirituality. The book also includes the first sustained account of Taylor's career as a social critic and political activist.

Clearly written and authoritative, this book will be welcomed by students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, politics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and theology.

1

Linguistic Philosophy and Phenomenology

At the core of Taylor’s project is the conviction that human reality is structured, and in some sense constituted, by layers of meaning. This is the first principle of his philosophical anthropology. But how is it to be made compelling? What resources are available to Taylor for exploring, refining and vindicating this idea? When Taylor arrived at Oxford in 1953, he found himself in the midst of the ‘linguistic revolution’ in English philosophy. The revolutionary idea of the Oxford philosophers was the discovery of what they took to be the authentic method of philosophical enquiry. The cornerstone of the method was the mobilization, as P. F. Strawson put it, of ‘a refined, thorough, and, above all, realistic awareness of the meaning of words’.¹ Such awareness would be secured by careful analysis of the ways in which words are used in ordinary language. The name given to the method was ‘linguistic analysis’ and the movement which practised it became known as ‘ordinary language philosophy’ and ‘linguistic philosophy’. We have already seen that Taylor found the analytic style of Oxford philosophy to his liking. But what else did it have to offer him? Besides the manner of its philosophizing, what more was there to learn from the linguistic movement that flourished at Oxford in the fifties?

Linguistic Philosophy

The idea that philosophy was properly a matter of linguistic analysis seemed plausible given a certain conception of the objects of human enquiry. The linguistic philosophers inherited from the British empiricist tradition the view that human enquiry divides into two great branches: the empirical and the conceptual. According to this distinction, empirical enquiry concerns ‘matters of fact’. It generates knowledge of facts and in this way it is informative about the world. Conceptual questions, by contrast, concern the meanings that thoughts and sentences must have in order to be able to convey facts at all. The focus of conceptual enquiry is the medium through which things appear in the world rather than the world itself. To be sure, this medium – language and thought – can also be the subject of empirical investigation: philology, for instance, is concerned with certain facts about language; psychology with facts about the mind.² But conceptual enquiry is distinct in that it aims to elucidate the ways in which we are able to mean things even in such factual accounts. And it is this clarification of sense-making activity that demarcates philosophy, as well as logic, from the empirical sciences. For Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin and the other pioneers of linguistic analysis, philosophy was circumscribed as conceptual enquiry. The specific task of philosophy was to elucidate the ‘logic of language’, to clarify the ways in which language users are able to make sense.

The linguistic philosophers were not alone in thinking that the aim of philosophy was the clarification of ‘meanings’: the view was common to all the philosophers of the analytic movement, from Russell and Moore to Wittgenstein and the logical positivists. But the Oxford philosophers of the fifties had a distinctive conception of how that aim was to be achieved and why it mattered.³ It was to be achieved in the first place by recognizing the diversity of the ordinary sense-making activities of language users. Such acknowledgement, they believed, was fatal to the belief that all meaningful expressions had something in common – an ‘essence’ of meaning – that analysis could serve to display. In the second place it was to be achieved by taking heed of the particularity of the ways in which meaning is conveyed in ordinary language. Just as previous philosophers tended to view meaning as if it possessed an essence, they were also inclined to believe that a single model of analysis would suffice for conceptual clarification. The models elaborated by Russell and the young Wittgenstein, for instance, had been inspired by the exacting clarity and precision displayed by the discourses of mathematics and formal logic. But as the later Wittgenstein – another key figure in the linguistic movement – had shown, they were inappropriate as tools for elucidating the meaning of many ordinary linguistic expressions. Far from clarifying their meaning, such models ended up either obscuring or distorting them. The problem was even more evident in the approach to meaning taken by logical positivism. The logical positivists put forward a simple test for telling whether a proposition conveyed sense: if the proposition claimed to say anything about the world, it was either empirically verifiable or else literally nonsense. But again, this approach took a feature of one type of discourse – in this case natural science – and generalized it into a theory of meaning that rode roughshod over the particularities of ordinary language use.

By attending to the particular details of the diverse forms of speech, without prejudice about how language must be in order to be able to convey sense, the linguistic philosophers would avoid the errors of their predecessors. But Russell, the young Wittgenstein and the logical positivists were not the only ones to be misled by inappropriate models of the logic of language: the whole field of metaphysics had succumbed to them. Metaphysical discourse, as the linguistic philosophers understood it, begins with certain puzzles and paradoxes thrown up by the attempt to think generally and systematically about fundamental concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘mind’ and ‘reality’. In order to resolve the paradoxes, the metaphysician constructs a theory; say, a theory of Truth or a theory of Mind. But such theories invariably end up being ‘shocking to common sense’, and worse, they distort the very concepts that philosophy seeks to understand. There thus arises the need for vigilance: to identify and to correct the conceptual distortions that creep into metaphysical thinking. The linguistic philosophers did not suppose that alertness to the full range of meanings a concept ordinarily conveys would solve the problems that gave rise to metaphysics. The point was rather to ‘dissolve’ the problems, to remove the source of puzzlement and paradox by bringing the metaphysically troublesome concept back to its ‘home’ usage in ordinary language. Linguistic philosophy provided a kind of antidote to an intellectual disease – the construction of metaphysical illusions.

The revolutionary thrust of linguistic analysis owed much to this ‘therapeutic’ conception of the tasks of philosophy. The primary goal of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) – one of the classic texts of the linguistic movement – was to dispel a long-standing philosophical myth about the nature of the mind by showing how it arises from confusion over the function of mental concepts. The myth in question was mind–body dualism: the idea that the mind is an entity, distinct from the body, which somehow resides invisibly within the body like a ‘ghost in a machine’. According to Ryle, the myth was one of the main legacies of the seventeenth-century philosopher Descartes. In Ryle’s view, it had since become so widely accepted that it even deserved to be called the ‘official doctrine’ of the mind. The dualist theory – or, as it is also called, ‘Cartesian dualism’ – maintains that every human being possesses both a mind and a body. The body belongs to the physical world, is open to external or public inspection, and is subject to the causal laws that determine the behaviour of physical objects. The body thus has an essentially machine-like existence. The mind, by contrast, has a spirit-like existence. The life of the mind is not accessible from the outside: it consists of a series of mental events or conscious episodes that are privately and incorrigibly witnessed ‘from within’, as it were, by whoever it is that experiences them. These mental events do not follow each other in the causally determinate way in which physical events unfold. They are not subject to mechanistic laws. The mind and body, according to the dualist doctrine, occupy different worlds and exist in fundamentally different ways. At the same time, they manage to interact and to be united in each individual human being. Each human being is an amalgam of the distinct entities of body and mind.

Ryle sought to show that the dualist theory of the mind was a paradigm case of metaphysical illusion. It is a commonplace of ordinary language, Ryle noted, to do things like communicate thoughts, express feelings, and ascribe intentions and motives to people. We do this without supposing that our interlocutor possesses an inner mental world, with its distinct mode of existence, in addition to a physical visible body. The idea that thoughts, feelings and intentions are properties of some invisible mental entity is a metaphysical construction designed to address questions like ‘what kind of stuff is the mind made of?’, ‘what are its chief attributes?’, or ‘how does the mind enter into causal relations with other kinds of thing?’. But such questions, Ryle suggests, only make sense if we suppose that what we do when we ordinarily use mental concepts is describe states of affairs, or ascribe properties to things, or denominate par-ticular kinds of object. And this is a mistake; a mistake in the categorization of the concepts we use, or as Ryle put it, a ‘category-mistake’. It is a category-mistake because it involves allocating a set of concepts – in this case mental concepts – to the wrong ‘logical type’. The mistake can be seen at work, Ryle argued, in a certain way of construing the difference between a statement that describes an action and a statement that ascribes a motive to the action. The mistaken construal is to take the latter as reporting a further fact, or as describing a ‘mental’ event that takes place in addition to the physical, observed event reported in the former statement. The confusion misleads the philosopher, who unlike the ordinary language user builds theories on the basis of conceptual categorization, into thinking that there is an inner series of mental events accompanying the publicly observable series of physical events. It then seems natural to posit the existence of an invisible entity, the mind, as their locus. According to Ryle, the very idea of the mind as an inner entity could only occur to someone who had failed to get the ‘logical geography’ of motive-ascription and kindred concepts clearly in view. Once it is in view, the questions that give rise to the Cartesian theory disappear, and with them the temptation to believe in anything like a ‘ghost in the machine’.

The justification of the linguistic method did not lie solely in the therapeutic exposition of conceptual confusion. It also pointed the way to a new, constructive philosophy based on an appreciation of the semantic nuances at play in ordinary language. But enough has been said now to consider how Taylor situated himself in relation to his Oxford professors. In ‘Phenomenology and Linguistic Analysis’ (1959), an article Taylor published while preparing his dissertation at Oxford, he expresses ambivalence towards them.⁴ The main lesson to be learned from the linguistic movement, he thinks, is the need for caution in adopting reductive modes of analysis. Reductive analysis attempts to translate the items of one language into those of another, in a way that brings out the true meaning of those items more fully, while eliminating the actual terms used in the original language. Clearly, the procedure is more likely to work if the meaning of the original terms is fairly straightforward. But the more complex, subtle and diverse the range of meanings conveyed in the original language, the less plausible the reductionist programme starts to look. By revealing the complexity of ordinary language, the linguistic philosophers helped to uncover deep problems fac-ing reductionist theories of meaning, such as the one advanced by logical positivism. And as we shall see later, Taylor would deploy the same strategy when dealing with reductionist analyses of human action put forward by behaviourism. More generally, Taylor applauds the linguistic philosopher’s reluctance to use a priori models of analysis. Rather than assuming in a dogmatic manner that language must be constituted in a certain way – that is, in accordance with some a priori model or requirement, like the capacity to name things or designate objects – we are properly enjoined by linguistic philosophy to look without fixed preconceptions at the language itself, at how it actually works. Linguistic philosophy rightly recommends alertness to the multiplicity of ways in which language is used and guardedness against the tendency to impose a single, homogenizing model. Taylor also has sympathy for the linguistic philosopher’s diagnostic thesis that ill-conceived, theoretically motivated constraints about how things must be can be a grievous source of error. The identification of such a priori constraints, Taylor agrees, gives philosophy an important therapeutic role. It enables us to see how implausible philosophical theories go wrong. Finally, Taylor emphatically concurs with Ryle that the Cartesian theory of the mind is one such theory. That is, he agrees with Ryle that the ‘ghost in the machine model’ is popular yet wildly implausible, and that the way to tackle it is to expose, through a kind of therapeutic reflection, the source of the error that makes us vulnerable to it.

On the other hand, Taylor had at best a sanguine view of what the linguistic method alone could achieve. In the first place, the grounds of its anti-metaphysical stance seemed shaky. Taylor observed that if linguistic analysis were to deliver a genuine alternative to metaphysics, it would have to proceed in a manner that was free from metaphysical presuppositions itself. It might meet this requirement in one of two ways: either by being neutral with respect to substantive conceptions of the world, or by justifying – and not just leaving to dogma – the view of the world it does favour. It was clear to Taylor that linguistic analysis was not free from metaphysics in the former sense, as Ryle’s account of the mind demonstrated. Ryle’s method licenses him to discount conceptions of the mind that are inconsistent or absurd by the standards of ordinary linguistic usage. But it only makes sense to do this, Taylor pointed out, if it is already assumed that the use of mental terms in ordinary language provides the framework for a consistent theory. And this itself is a metaphysically loaded, and far from self-evident, conception of language. Moreover, even if a consistent theory could be extracted from ordinary language, there is little reason to think it would be a neutral one in the required sense. The idea that ordinary language clothes a neutral, common-sense view of the world that can serve as an arbiter between theories simply ignores the ways in which common sense is marked by traces of substantive scientific, metaphysical and theological belief. Common sense is not a repository of neutral or ‘natural’ beliefs and practices. It is a historically contingent way of interpreting and dealing with the world. The fact that it is a contingent product of history does not of course make it false. But it does make it metaphysically partial. Taylor concluded that the linguistic method was not free of presuppositions as the Oxford philosophers claimed. It was not without prejudice on the issue of how the world is constituted.

So if the linguistic method was really free of metaphysics, it had to be because the substantive views it does favour are not posited dogmatically. But this is just what does seem to happen when common sense or ordinary language usage is summoned to arbitrate disputes. The point of linguistic analysis is to uncover conceptual confusions, which it does by identifying discrepancies between ordinary usage and the revisionary one. But why assume, Taylor remarks, that conflict with common sense amounts to confusion? Prima facie arguments can be given for siding with common sense: for instance, that ordinary language has to prove itself in countless acts of communication, or that it embodies the practical knowledge of past generations. But such arguments themselves have to be proved against other rival claims and theories. And then, as Taylor points out, we are no longer engaged in linguistic analysis, but in some other form of argumentative discourse. Whether common sense can be vindicated at this level or not, the point is that linguistic analysis alone will not provide the answer. We have to move beyond the standards of argument warranted by the linguistic method itself. Without such argument, common sense is taken on trust, and the method rests on a dogma. With such argument, the method has recourse to other, non-linguistic forms of reasoning. But linguistic analysis tells us little about how such reasoning proceeds.

This is a serious weakness, in Taylor’s view, because we ought to be concerned not just with the meaning of fundamental concepts but with their validity. It is a major concern of Taylor’s that, in limiting itself to the description of the use of concepts in ordinary language, linguistic analysis is insufficiently critical. By leaving language ‘as it is’, it made it impossible to assess the concepts embedded in given linguistic practices or ‘language games’. Neither the mere description of the varieties of linguistic usage, nor the ‘dissolution of paradox’ that the proper classification of concepts is supposed to bring, allows us to focus on the decisive issue of validity. Consequently, as Taylor put it, the linguistic method generated a ‘strange permissiveness and tolerance as to the content of belief’.⁵ Any violation of ordinary usage – say, of ‘the language of religious worship in its appropriate place in the proper “language game” ’ – is left ‘not above, but beyond reproach’.⁶ But validity that is earned so easily – by simply having its own place in a linguistic practice – is ‘hardly an interesting kind of validity’. For it simply bypasses the fundamental problem that many of the concepts and beliefs that feature in different forms of linguistic usage are incompatible with each other. It is here, with competing bodies of doctrine about the constitution of reality, with rival models of knowledge, and the inflection of such doctrines and models in common-sense belief, that most philosophical problems arise. They do not typically arise, as the linguistic philosophers maintained, from paradoxes arising from the misunderstanding of the logic of language as such. If philosophy has a therapeutic role – and the widespread grip of Cartesian dualism suggests it does – then it will have to take these features into account and not just confused models of conceptual anatomy.

The linguistic method was thus hardly well suited for Taylor’s project. First, it made the question of human subjectivity accessible only indirectly through what we are entitled to say about it in ordinary language. It therefore imposed arbitrary limits on how the constitution of human subjectivity could be explored. Second, it faile...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Linguistic Philosophy and Phenomenology
• 2 Science, Action and the Mind
• 3 The Romantic Legacy
• 4 The Self and the Good
• 5 Interpretation and the Social Sciences
• 6 Individual and Community
• 7 Politics and Social Criticism
• 8 Modernity, Art and Religion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index