Human agency and language (Philosophical Papers 1)

302 Pages·1985·13.56 MB·English

by  Charles Taylor

HUMAN AGENCY AND
LANGUAGE
PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS
I
CHARLES TAYLOR
Professor of Philosophy and Political Science
McGill University, Montreal
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©Cambridge University Press 198 5
First published 1985
Printed in Great Britain at The Pitman Press, Bath
Library of Congress catalogue card number: 84-16966
British Lihrary cataloguing in publication data
Taylor, Charles
Human agency and language.-(Philosophical
papers/Charles Taylor; 1)
1. Psychology-Philosophy
I. Title
150'.r BF38
ISBN o 52r 26752 8 hard covers
ISBN o 521 31750 9 paperback
pp
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements page Vll
Introduction
AGENCY AND THE SELF 13
What is human agency? 15
2 Self-interpreting animals 45
3 Hegel's philosophy of mind 77
4 The concept of a person 97
II PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY AND MIND 115
5 Peaceful coexistence in psychology 117
6 What is involved in a genetic psychology? 139
7 How is mechanism conceivable? 164
8 Cognitive psychology 187
TIT PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 213
9 Language and human nature 215
10 Theories of meaning 248
Index 293

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I. 'What is human agency?', from T. Mischel (ed.), The Self (Oxford,
Blackwell, 1977), pp. 103-3 5 ·
2. 'Self-interpreting animals', September 1977, unpublished.
3· 'Hegel's philosophy of mind', from G. Fl0istad (ed.), Contenzporary
Philosophy: A New Survey (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), vol. 4,
pp. IJ3-55·
An earlier version of this paper was read at the conference on Hegel and
the Philosophy of Action, sponsored by the Hegel Society of Great
Britain, Merton College, Oxford, September 1981.
4· 'The concept of a person', from Social Theory as Practice, The B. N.
Ganguli Memorial Lectures 198 r (Delhi, Oxford University Press, r98 3 ),
pp. 48-67.
5. 'Peaceful coexistence in psychology', from Social Research, 40: r
(Spring 1~n3), pp. 5 5-R2.
This paper was delivered as a lecture to a meeting of Section 24 of the
American Psychological Association, Hawaii, 4 September 1972.
6. 'What is involved in a genetic psychology?', from T. Mischel (ed.),
Cognitive Development and Epistemology (New York and London,
Academic Press, 1971 ), pp. 3 9 3-416.
7· 'How is mechanism conceivable?', from Marjorie Grene (ed.), inter
pretations of Life and Mind: Essays around the Problem of Reduction
(London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 38-64.
An earlier version of this paper, delivered at the Loyota University
Centennial Celebration, October 1970, has been published in A.
Karazmar and J. C. Eccles, Brain and T-luman Behavior (New York,
Springer-Verlag, 1970).
8. 'Cognitive psychology'; a slightly different version appeared as 'The
significance of significance: the case of cognitive psychology', in S.
Mitchell and M. Rosen (eds.), The Need for Interpretation (London,
Athlone Press, 1983), pp. 141-69.
9. 'Language and human nature'; this paper was delivered as the Alan B.
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Plaunt Memorial Lecture, University of Carleton, Ottowa, April 1978.
A shortened version was published under the title "Theories of meaning'
in Man and World, 13:3-4 (1980), pp. 281-302.
10. "Theories of meaning', Dawes Hicks lecture on philosophy, presented
to the British Academy, London, 1980, and published in Proceedings of
the British Academy, 66 \ 1.980), pp. 2.83-3 2. 7 \Oxford University Press).
INTRODUCTION
Despite the appearance of variety in the papers published in this collec
tion, they are the work of a monomaniac; or perhaps better, what Isaiah
Berlin has called a hedgehog. If not a single idea, then at least a single
rather tightly related agenda underlines all of them. lf one had to find a
name for where this agenda falls in the geography of philosophical
domains, the term 'philosophical anthropology' would perhaps be best,
although this term seems to make English-speaking philosophers uneasy.
I started on it with a polemical concern. I wanted to argue against the
understanding of human life and action implicit in an influential family
of theories in the sciences of man. The common feature of this family is
the ambition to model the study of man on the natural sciences. Theories
of this kind seem to me to be terribly implausible. They lead to very bad
science: either they end up in wordy elaborations of the obvious, or they
fail altogether to address the interesting questions, or their practitioners
end up squandering their talents and ingenuity in the attempt to show
that they can after al1 recapture the insights of ordinary life in their
manifestly reductive explanatory languages.
Indeed, one could argue that the second and third pitfalls should rather
be seen as the horns of a dilemma: either these inadequate theories avoid
the interesting questions, or they show themselves up, and hence have to
expend more and more energy defending themselves against the charge of
irrelevancy. Behaviourism offers the classical example. The original
popular experimental design, running rats in mazes, in fact screened out
the interesting phenomena of insightful learning. Once these are put on
the agenda, behaviourism enters its long decline, moving through phase
after phase of special pleading. Something similar seems to be emerging
with theories purporting to explain intelligent performance on a model
based on the digital computer. Artificial Intelligence programs tend to do
rather well on very explicitly structured tasks, like playing chess, and even
more checkers, and become more and more manifestly inadequate the
more they call on implicit know-how. (I have tried to draw the boundary
2 INTRODUCTION
between the areas where a mechanistic psychology can be useful and those
where it must fail in volume 1 chapter 5. )
What is striking about this family of theories is their reductive nature;
they arc all trying to avoid recognizing some important and obtrusive
aspect of human life, and purport to explain the phenomena we normally
understand in terms of this aspect by other factors. Behaviourism, which
was the target of my Explanation of Behaviour, 1 tried to ignore purpose
and intentionality, indeed, even to side-step consciousness. Computer
influenced theories ignore what I call 'significance' in volume T chapter 8,
the fact that we are beings to whom things matter. The atomist theories
which I discuss in volume 2 chapter I have no place for the common
meanings which are embedded in our institutions and practices; they see
political culture as a question of the 'orientations' of individuals.
But this diversity in the aspect ignored raises the question whether my
targets really form a family. The theories I want to attack take issue
explicitly with each other on this matter of reduction. For instance, the
theories of cognitive psychology were partly devised to cope with the
manifest inadequacies of behaviourism. One of their strongest talking
points was that they could cope with the phenomena of intelligence which
behaviourism was committed to deny.
But I think that for all the diversity of these reductionisms they form a
family nonetheless. What they have in common is a certain metaphysical
motivation. Defining this has been in a sense the next item on my agenda
after the polemic against them. In fact the motivation is many-faceted,
but one way of defining it is via the paradigm status accorded to the
natural sciences as the models for the sciences of man. In a certain sense of
the term, this family of theories shares an allegiance to 'naturalism', by
which I mean not just the view that man can be seen as part of nature-in
one sense or other this would surely be accepted by everyone-but that the
nature of which he is a part is to be understood according to the canons
which emerged in the seventeenth-century revolution in natural science.
One of the most important of these is that we must avoid anthropocentric
properties (what I call in the first section of volume 1 chapter 2 'subjec
tive' properties), and give an account of things in absolute terms.
'Anthropocentric' properties are those which things have only within the
experience of agents of a certain kind - the classical example in the
seventeenth-century discussion are the 'secondary' qualities; while
'absolute' properties (I borrow the term from Bernard Williams in his
1 London and New York, 1964.
INTRODUCTION 3
Descartes)2 are supposedly free of any such relativity. This requirement
can be more or less stringently interpreted and can be applied at different
levels, which accounts, I believe, for the variety of reductionist views, but
it underlies all of them.
But naturalism is more than a view about the language of science. It
ramifies also into an understanding of agency. This too can be described
first negatively, in terms of what its reductionist temper ignores. What it
fails to recognize is a crucial feature of our ordinary understanding of
human agency, of a person or self.
One way of getting at this feature is in terms of the notion of self
interpretation. A fully competent human agent not only has some under
standing (which may be also more or less misunderstanding) of himself,
but is partly constituted by this understanding. This is a thesis of post
Heideggerian hermeneutics, which I have tried to develop in a number of
papers (especially volume 1 chapter 1 and volume 2 chapter I). But it still
does not capture the crucial point. This is that our self-understanding
essentially incorporates our seeing ourselves against a background of
what I have called 'strong evaluation'. I mean by that a background of
distinctions between things which are recognized as of categoric or un
conditioned or higher importance or worth, and things which lack this or
are of lesser value. I discuss what is involved in this kind of distinction in
volume I chapters T and 2.
ln other terms, to be a full human agent, to be a person or a self in the
ordinary meaning, is to exist in a space defined by distinctions of worth. A
self is a being for whom certain questions of categoric value have arisen,
and received at least partial answers. Perhaps these have been given
authoritatively by the culture more than they have been elaborated in the
deliberation of the person concerned, but they are his in the sense that
they are incorporated into his self-understanding, in some degree and
fashion. My claim is that this is not just a contingent fact about human
agents, but is essential to what we would understand and recognize as
full, normal human agency.
But if this is so, then the programme of naturalism as I define it above is
severely limited in principle. For there can be no absolute understanding
of what we are as persons, and this in two obvious respects. A being who
exists only in self-interpretation cannot be understood absolutely; and
one who can only be understood against the background of distinctions of
worth cannot be captured by a scientific language which essentially
2 Harrnohdsworth, L~;178.