charles taylor intepretation and the sciences of man

7/27/2019 Charles Taylor Intepretation and the Sciences of Man

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4 CHARLES TAYLOR

claims of the order: the meaning confusedly present inthis text or text-analogue is clearly expressed here. Themeaning, in other words, is one which admits of morethan one expression, and, in this sense, a distinctionmust be possible between meaning and expression.

The point of the above qualification, that thisdistinction may be only relative, is that there are caseswhere no clear, unambiguous, nonarbitrary line can bedrawn between what is said and its expression. It can beplausibly argued (I think convincingly although thereisnt space to go into it here) that this is the normal and

fundamental condition of meaningful expression, thatexact synonymy, or equivalence of meaning, is a rareand localized achievement of specialized languages oruses of civilization. But this, if true (and I think it is),doesn't do away with the distinction between meaningand expression. Even if there is an important sense inwhich a meaning re-expressed in a new medium can notbe declared identical, this by no means entails that wecan give no sense to the project of expressing a meaningin a new way. It does of course raise an interesting anddifficult question about what can be meant by expressingit in a clearer way: what is the it which is clarified if

equivalence is denied? I hope to return to this inexamining interpretation in the sciences of man.

Hence the object of a science of interpretation mustbe describ- able in terms of sense and nonsense,coherence and its absence; and must admit of adistinction between meaning and its expression.

3) There is also a third condition it must meet. Wecan speak of sense or coherence, and of their differentembodiments, in connection with such phenomena asgestalts, or patterns in rock formations, or snow crystals,where the notion of expression has no real warrant.What is lacking here is the notion of a subject for whomthese meanings are. Without such a subject, the choice

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INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 5

that of a subject. The identification of the subject is byno means necessarily unproblematical, as we shall seefurther on; it may be one of the most difficult problems,an area in which prevailing epistemological prejudicemay blind us to the nature of our object of study. Ithink this has been the case, as I will show below. Andmoreover, the identification of a subject does not assureus of a clear and absolute distinction between meaningand expression as we saw above. But any suchdistinction, even a relative one, is without any anchor atall, is totally arbitrary, without appeal to a subject.

The object of a science of interpretation must thushave: sense, distinguishable from its expression, which isfor or by a subject.

ii

Before going on to see in what way, if any, theseconditions are realized in the sciences of man, I think itwould be useful to set out more clearly what rides onthis question, why it matters whether or not we think ofthe sciences of man as hermeneutical, what the issue isat stake here.

The issue here is at root an epistemological one. Butit is inextricable from an ontological one, and, hence,cannot but be relevant to our notions of science and ofthe proper conduct of inquiry. We might say that it isan ontological issue which has been argued ever sincethe seventeenth century in terms of epistemologicalconsiderations which have appeared to some to beunanswerable.

The case could be put in these terms: what are thecriteria of judgment in a hermeneutical science? Asuccessful interpretation is one which makes clear the

meaning originally present in a confused, fragmentary,cloudy form. But how does one know that thisinterpretation is correct? Presumably because it makes

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6 CHARLES TAYLOR

But this appeal to our understanding seems to becrucially inadequate. What if someone does not see theadequacy of our interpretation, does not accept ourreading? We try to show him how it makes sense of theoriginal non- or partial sense. But for him to follow ushe must read the original language as we do, he mustrecognize these expressions as puzzling in a certain way,and hence be looking for a solution to our problem. Ifhe does not, what can we do? The answer, it wouldseem, can only be more of the same. We have to showhim through the reading of other expressions why thisexpression must be read in the way we propose. But

success here requires that he follow us in these otherreadings, and so on, it would seem, potentially forever.We cannot escape an ultimate appeal to a commonunderstanding of the expressions, of the languageinvolved. This is one way of trying to express what hasbeen called the hermeneutical circle. What we aretrying to establish is a certain reading of text orexpressions, and what we appeal to as our grounds forthis reading can only be other readings. The circle canalso be put in terms of part-whole relations: we aretrying to establish a reading for the whole text, and forthis we appeal to readings of its partial expressions; and

yet because we are dealing with meaning, with makingsense, where expressions only make sense or not inrelation to others, the readings of partial expressionsdepend on those of others, and ultimately of the whole.

Put in forensic terms, as we started to do above, wecan only convince an interlocutor if at some point heshares our understanding of the language concerned. Ifhe does not, there is no further step to take in rationalargument; we can try to awaken these intuitions in him,or we can simply give up; argument will advance us nofurther. But of course the forensic predicament can be

transferred into my own judging: if I am this ill-equipped to convince a stubborn interlocutor, how can Iconvince myself? how can I be sure? Maybe my

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been the only or even the main response of ourphilosophical tradition. And it is another response whichhas had an important and far-reaching effect on thesciences of man. The demand has been for a level ofcertainty which can only be attained by breaking beyondthe circle.

There are two ways in which this break-out hasbeen envisaged. The first might be called therationalist one and could be thought to reach aculmination in Hegel. It does not involve a negation ofintuition, or of our understanding of meaning, but ratheraspires to attainment of an understanding of such claritythat it would carry with it the certainty of theundeniable. In Hegels case, for instance, our fullunderstanding of the whole in thought carries with it agrasp of its inner necessity, such that we see how itcould not be otherwise. No higher grade of certainty isconceivable. For this aspiration the word break-out isbadly chosen; the aim is rather to bring understanding toan inner clarity which is absolute.

The other way, which we can call empiricist, is agenuine attempt to go beyond the circle of our owninterpretations, to get beyond subjectivity. The attempt isto reconstruct knowledge in such a way that there is noneed to make final appeal to readings or judgmentswhich can not be checked further. That is why the basicbuilding block of knowledge on this view is theimpression, or sense-datum, a unit of information whichis not the deliverance of a judgment, which has bydefinition no element in it of reading or interpretation,which is a brute datum. The highest ambition would beto build our knowledge from such building blocks by

judgments which could be anchored in a certaintybeyond subjective intuition. This is what underlies theattraction of the notion of the association of ideas, or ifthe same procedure is viewed as a method, induction. Ifthe original acquisition of the units of information is not

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e no on o ru e a a ere as some re a on o, u s no a a e same as e ru e ac scussed by Elizabeth Anscombe, On Brute Facts, Analysis, v. 18, 1957-1958, pp. 69-72, and Johnarle, Speech Acts, Cambridge, 1969, pp. 50-53. For Anscombe and Searle, brute facts are contrasted toat may be called institutional facts, to use Searles term, i.e., facts which presuppose the existence oftain institutions. Voting would be an example. But, as we shall see below in part II, some institu tional facts,ch as Xs having voted Liberal, can be verified as brute data in the sense used here, and thus find a placethe category of political behavior. What cannot as easily be described in terms of brute data are thetitutions themselves. Cf. the discussion below in part II.

8 CHARLES TAYLOR

to an important tradition in the philosophy of science,whose main contemporary protagonists are the logicalempiricists. Verification must be grounded ultimately inthe acquisition of brute data. By brute data, I meanhere and throughout data whose validity cannot bequestioned by offering another interpretation or reading,data whose credibility cannot be founded or underminedby further reasoning.4 If such a difference ofinterpretation can arise over given data, then it must bepossible to structure the argument so as to distinguishthe basic, brute data from the inferences made on thebasis of them.

The inferences themselves, of course, to be validmust similarly be beyond the challenge of a rivalinterpretation. Here the logical empiricists added to thearmory of traditional empiricism which set great store bythe method of induction, the whole domain of logicaland mathematical inference which had been central tothe rationalist position (with Leibniz at least, althoughnot with Hegel), and which offered another brand ofunquestionable certainty.

Of course, mathematical inference and empiricalverification were combined in such a way that two

theories or more could be verified of the same domainof facts. But this was a consequence to which logicalempiricism was willing to accommodate itself. As forthe surplus meaning in a theory which could not be

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10 CHARLES TAYLOR

follows a certain set of notions of what the sciences ofman must be.

On the other hand, many, including myself, wouldlike to argue that these notions about the sciences ofman are sterile, that we cannot come to understandimportant dimensions of human life within the boundsset by this epistemological orientation. This dispute is ofcourse familiar to all in at least some of its ramifica-tions. What I want to claim is that the issue can befruitfully posed in terms of the notion of interpretationas I began to outline it above.

I think this way of putting the question is usefulbecause it allows us at once to bring to the surface thepowerful epistemological beliefs which underlie theorthodox view of the sciences of man in our academy,and to make explicit the notion of our epistemologicalpredicament implicit in the apposing thesis. This is infact rather more way-out and shocking to the tradition ofscientific thought than is often admitted or realized bythe opponents of narrow scientism. It may not strengthenthe case of the opposition to bring out fully what isinvolved in a hermeneutical science as far as convincingwaverers is concerned, but a gain in clarity is surely

worth a thinning of the ranksat least in philosophy.

iii

Before going on to look at the case of politicalscience, it might be worth asking another question: whyshould we even pose the question whether the sciencesof man are hermeneutical? What gives us the idea in thefirst place that men and their actions constitute an objector a series of objects which meet the conditions outlinedabove?

The answer is that on the phenomenological level orthat of ordinary speech (and the two converge for thepurposes of this argument) a certain notion of meaning

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not is another matter; it certainly differs from linguisticmeaning. But it would be very hard to argue that it is anillegitimate use of the term.

When we speak of the meaning of a givenpredicament, we are using a concept which has thefollowing articulation, a) Meaning is for a subject: it isnot the meaning of the situation in vacuo, but itsmeaning for a subject, a specific subject, a group ofsubjects, or perhaps what its meaning is for the humansubject as such (even though particular humans might bereproached with not admitting or realizing this). b)Meaning is of something; that is, we can distinguishbetween a given elementsituation, action, or whateverand its meaning. But this is not to say that they arephysically separable. Rather we are dealing with twodescriptions of the element, in one of which it ischaracterized in terms of its meaning for the subject. Butthe relations between the two descriptions are notsymmetrical. For, on the one hand, the description interms of meaning cannot be unless descriptions of theother kind apply as well; or put differently, there can beno meaning without a substrate. But on the other hand,it may be that the same meaning may be borne by

another substratee.g., a situation with the samemeaning may be realized in different physical conditions.There is a necessary role for a potentially substitutablesubstrate; or all meanings are of something.

And thirdly, c) things only have meaning in a field,that is, in relation to the meanings of other things. Thismeans that there is no such thing as a single, unrelatedmeaningful element; and it means that changes in theother meanings in the field can involve changes in thegiven element. Meanings cant be identified except inrelation to others, and in this way resemble words. Themeaning of a word depends, for instance, on those wordswith which it contrasts, on those which define its placein the language (e.g., those defining determinable



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12 CHARLES TAYLOR

meanings that a subordinates demeanor can have for us,as deferential, respectful, cringing, mildly mocking,ironical, insolent, provoking, downright rude, areestablished by a field of contrast; and as with finerdiscrimination on our part, or a more sophisticatedculture, new possibilities are born, so other terms of thisrange are altered. And as the meaning of our termsred, blue, green is fixed by the definition of afield of contrast through the determinable term color,so all these alternative demeanors are only available in asociety which has, among other types, hierarchicalrelations of power and command. And corresponding to

the underlying language game of designating coloredobjects is the set of social practices which sustain thesehierarchical structures and are fulfilled in them.

Meaning in this senselet us call it experientialmeaning thus is for a subject, of something, in afield. This distinguishes it from linguistic meaning whichhas a four and not threedimensional structure. Linguisticmeaning is for subjects and in a field, but it is themeaning of signifiers and it is about a world ofreferents. Once we are clear about the likenesses anddifferences, there should be little doubt that the term

meaning is not a misnomer, the product of anillegitimate extension into this context of experience andbehavior.

There is thus a quite legitimate notion of meaningwhich we use when we speak of the meaning of asituation for an agent. And that this concept has a placeis integral to our ordinary consciousness and hencespeech about our actions. Our actions are ordinarilycharacterized by the purpose sought and explained bydesires, feelings, emotions. But the language by whichwe describe our goals, feelings, desires is also adefinition of the meaning things have for us. Thevocabulary defining meaningwords like terrifying,attractiveis linked with that describing feeling

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that it be related to this situation and give rise to thistype of disposition. But this situation in its turn canonly be identified in relation to the feelings which itprovokes; and the disposition is to a goal which cansimilarly not be understood without reference to thefeelings experienced: the hiding in question is onewhich will cover up my shame; it is not the same ashiding from an armed pursuer; we can only understandwhat is meant by hiding here if we understand whatkind of feeling and situation is being talked about. Wehave to be within the circle.

An emotion term like shame can only beexplained by reference to other concepts which in turncannot be understood without reference to shame. Tounderstand these concepts we have to be in on a certainexperience, we have to understand a certain language,not just of words, but also a certain language of mutualaction and communication, by which we blame, exhort,admire, esteem each other. In the end we are in on thisbecause we grow up in the ambit of certain commonmeanings. But we can often experience what it is like tobe on the outside when we encounter the feeling, action,and experiential meaning language of another

civilization. Here there is no translation, no way ofexplaining in other, more accessible concepts. We canonly catch on by getting somehow into their way of life,if only in imagination. Thus if we look at humanbehavior as action done out of a background of desire,feeling, emotion, then we are looking at a reality whichmust be characterized in terms of meaning. But doesthis mean that it can be the object of a hermeneuticalscience as this was outlined above?

There are, to remind ourselves, three characteristicsthat the object of a science of interpretation has: it musthave sense or coherence; this must be distinguishablefrom its expression, and this sense must be for asubject.



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which the hidden relations of a society are supposedlyshown up in a dramatic confrontation. But this is notscientific understanding, even though it may perhaps bebased on such understanding, or claim to be.

But in science the text-analogue is replaced by atext, an account. Which might prompt the question, howwe can even begin to talk of interpretation here, ofexpressing the same meaning more clearly, when wehave two such utterly different terms of comparison, atext and a tract of behavior? Is the whole thing not justa bad pun?

This question leads us to open up another aspect ofexperiential meaning which we abstracted from earlier.Experiential meanings are defined in fields of contrast,as words are in semantic fields.

But what was not mentioned above is that these twokinds of definition arent independent of each other. Therange of human desires, feelings, emotions, and hencemeanings is bound up with the level and type of culture,which in turn is inseparable from the distinctions andcategories marked by the language people speak. Thefield of meanings in which a given situation can find its

place is bound up with the semantic field of the termscharacterizing these meanings and the related feelings,desires, predicaments.

But the relationship involved here is not a simpleone. There are two simple types of models of relationwhich could be offered here, but both are inadequate.We could think of the feeling vocabulary as simplydescribing pre-existing feelings, as marking distinctionswhich would be there without them. But this is notadequate because we often experience in ourselves orothers how achieving, say, a more sophisticated

vocabulary of the emotions makes our emotional lifemore sophisticated and not just our descriptions of it.Reading a good, powerful novel may give me the picture

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. . c os y, onsensus an eo ogy n mer can o cs, mer can o ca c enceReview, v. 58, 1964, pp. 361-382.

20 CHARLES TAYLOR

But how did we design the questionnaire? How did wepick these propositions? Here we relied on ourunderstanding of the goals, values, vision involved. Butthen this understanding can be challenged, and hence thesignificance of our results questioned. Perhaps thefinding of our study, the compiling of proportions ofassent and dissent to these propositions is irrelevant, iswithout significance for understanding the agents or thepolity concerned. This kind of attack is frequently madeby critics of mainstream political science, or for thatmatter social science in general.

To this the proponents of this mainstream reply witha standard move of logical empiricism: distinguishing theprocess of discovery from the logic of verification. Ofcourse, it is our understanding of these meanings whichenables us to draw up the questionnaire which will testpeoples attitudes in respect to them. And, of course,interpretive dispute about these meanings is potentiallyendless; there are no brute data at this level, everyaffirmation can be challenged by a rival interpretation.But this has nothing to do with verifiable science. Whatis firmly verified is the set of correlations between, say,the assent to certain propositions and certain behavior.

We discover, for instance, that people who are activepolitically (defined by participation in a certain set ofinstitutions) are more likely to consent to certain sets ofpropositions supposedly expressing the values underlyingthe system.6 This finding is a firmly verified correlationno matter what one thinks of the reasoning, or simplehunches, that went into designing the research whichestablished it. Political science as a body of knowledgeis made up of such correlations; it does not give a truthvalue to the background reasoning or hunch. A goodinter retive nose ma be useful in hittin on the ri ht



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a r e . mon an . ng am owe , ompara ve o cs: a eve opmen approach, Boston and Toronto, 1966. Page references in my text here and below are to this work.

22 CHARLES TAYLOR

Powell 7 as the psychological dimension of the politicalsystem (23). Further on they state: Political culture isthe pattern of individual attitudes and orientationstowards politics among the members of a politicalsystem. It is the subjective realm which underlies andgives meaning to political actions (50). The authorsthen go on to distinguish three different kinds of orienta-tions, cognitive (knowledge and beliefs), affective(feelings), and evaluative (judgments and opinions).

From the point of view of empiricist epistemology,this set of categorial principles leaves nothing out. Both

reality and the meanings it has for actors are coped with.But what it in fact cannot allow for are inter subjectivemeanings, that is, it cannot allow for the validity ofdescriptions of social reality in terms of meanings, hencenot as brute data, which are not in quotation marks andattributed as opinion, attitude, etc. to individual(s). Nowit is this exclusion that I would like to challenge in thename of another set of categorial principles, inspired bya quite other epistemology.

ii

We spoke earlier about the brute data identificationof acts by means of institutional rules. Thus, putting across beside someones name on a slip of paper andputting this in a box counts in the right context asvoting for that person; leaving the room, saying orwriting a certain form of words, counts as breaking offthe negotiations; writing ones name on a piece of papercounts as signing the petition, etc. But what is worthlooking at is what underlies this set of identifications.These identifications are the application of a language ofsocial life, a language which marks distinctions among



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. omas . m , e grar an r g ns o o ern apan. an or , , c . . spe of consensus is also found in other traditional societies. Cf. for instance, the desa system of thedonesian village.


infested language, the semantic space of this range ofsocial activity is carved up in a certain way, by acertain set of distinctions which our vocabulary marks;and the shape and nature of these distinctions is thenature of our language in this area. These distinctionsare applied in our society with more or less formalismin different contexts.

But of course this is not true of every society. Ourwhole notion of negotiation is bound up for instancewith the distinct identity and autonomy of the parties,with the willed nature of their relations; it is a verycontractual notion. But other societies have no suchconception. It is reported about the traditional Japanesevillage that the foundation of its social life was apowerful form of consensus, which put a high premiumon unanimous decision. 8 Such a consensus would beconsidered shattered if two clearly articulated partieswere to separate out, pursuing opposed aims andattempting either to vote down the opposition or push itinto a settlement on the most favorable possible termsfor themselves. Discussion there must be, and some kindof adjustment of differences. But our idea of bargaining,with the assumption of distinct autonomous parties in

willed relationship, has no place there; nor does a seriesof distinctions, like entering into and leaving negotiation,or bargaining in good faith (sc. with the genuineintention of seeking agreement).

Now the difference between our society and one ofthe kind just described could not be well expressed ifwe said we have a vocabulary to describe negotiationwhich they lack. We might say, for instance, that wehave a vocabulary to describe the heavens that they lack,

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24 CHARLES TAYLOR

gloss is not just a difference of vocabulary, but also oneof social reality.

But this still may be misleading as a way of puttingthe difference. For it might imply that there is a socialreality which can be discovered in each society andwhich might exist quite independently of the vocabularyof that society, or indeed of any vocabulary, as theheavens would exist whether men theorized about themor not. And this is not the case; the realities here arepractices; and these cannot be identified in abstractionfrom the language we use to describe them, or invokethem, or carry them out. That the practice of negotiationallows us to distinguish bargaining in good or bad faith,or entering into or breaking off negotiations, presupposesthat our acts and situation have a certain description forus, e.g., that we are distinct parties entering into willedrelations. But they cannot have these descriptions for usunless this is somehow expressed in our vocabulary ofthis practice; if not in our descriptions of the practices(for we may as yet be unconscious of some of theimportant distinctions) in the appropriate language forcarrying them on. (Thus, the language marking adistinction between public and private acts or contextsmay exist even where these terms or their equivalentsare not part of this language; for the distinction will bemarked by the different language which is appropriate inone context and the other, be it perhaps a difference ofstyle, or dialect, even though the distinction is notdesignated by specific descriptive expressions.)

The situation we have here is one in which thevocabulary of a given social dimension is grounded inthe shape of social practice in this dimension; that is,the vocabulary wouldnt make sense, couldnt be appliedsensibly, where this range of practices didnt prevail.And yet this range of practices couldnt exist without theprevalence of this or some related vocabulary. There isno simple one-way dependence here. We can speak of

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. ear e, peec c s: an ssay n e osop y o anguage, am r ge, , pp.42.

10 Cf. the discussion in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? New York, 1969, pp. 21-31.


Searle, with his concept of a constitutive rule. As Searlepoints out,9 we are normally induced to think of rulesas applying to behavior which could be available to uswhether or not the rule existed. Some rules are like this,they are regulative like commandments: dont take thegoods of another. But there are other rules, e.g., thatgoverning the Queens move in chess, which are not soseparable. If one suspends these rules, or imagines astate in which they have not yet been introduced, thenthe whole range of behavior in question, in this case,chess playing, would not be. There would still, ofcourse, be the activity of pushing a wood piece around

on a board made of squares 8 by 8; but this is notchess any longer. Rules of this kind are constitutiverules. By contrast again, there are other rules of chess,such as that one say jadoube when one touches apiece without intending to play it, which are clearlyregulative.10

I am suggesting that this notion of the constitutivebe extended beyond the domain of rule-governedbehavior. That is why I suggest the vaguer wordpractice. Even in an area where there are no clearlydefined rules, there are distinctions between different

sorts of behavior such that one sort is considered theappropriate form for one action or context, the other foranother action or context; e.g., doing or saying certainthings amounts to breaking off negotiations, doing orsaying other things amounts to making a new offer. Butust as there are constitutive rules i.e., rules such thatthe behavior they govern could not exist without them,and which are in this sense inseparable from thatbehavior, so I am suggesting that there are constitutivedistinctions, constitutive ranges of language which are

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26 CHARLES TAYLOR

to the practice of voting is that some decision or verdictbe delivered (a man elected, a measure passed), throughsome criterion of preponderance (simple majority, two-thirds majority, or whatever) out of a set of micro-choices (the votes of the citizens, MPs, delegates). Ifthere is not some such significance attached to ourbehavior, no amount of marking and counting pieces ofpaper, raising hands, walking out into lobbies amounts tovoting. From this it follows that the institution of votingmust be such that certain distinctions have application:

e.g., that betweensomeone

being elected, or a measure passed, and their failing ofelection, or passage; that between a valid vote and aninvalid one which in turn requires a distinction betweena real choice and one which is forced or counterfeited.For no matter how far we move from the Rous- seauiannotion that each man decide in full autonomy, the veryinstitution of the vote requires that in some sense theenfranchised choose. For there to be voting in a senserecognizably like ours, there must be a distinction inmens self-interpretations between autonomy and forcedchoice.

This is to say that an activity of marking andcounting papers has to bear intentional descriptionswhich fall within a certain range before we can agree tocall it voting, just as the intercourse of two men orteams has to bear descriptions of a certain range beforewe will call it negotiation. Or in other words, that somepractice is voting or negotiation has to do in part withthe vocabulary established in a society as appropriate forengaging in it or describing it.

Hence implicit in these practices is a certain visionof the agent and his relation to others and to society.

We saw in connection with negotiation in our societythat it requires a picture of the parties as in some sense



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rational action and the satisfactions thereof, areunavailable to them. The meaning of these terms isopaque to them because they have a different structureof experiential meaning open to them.

We can think of the difference between our societyand the simplified version of the traditional Japanesevillage as consisting in this, that the range of meaningopen to the members of the two societies is verydifferent. But what we are dealing with here is not sub-

jective meaning which can fit into the categorial grid ofbehavioral political science, but rather inter subjectivemeanings. It is not just that the people in our society allor mostly have a given set of ideas in their heads andsubscribe to a given set of goals. The meanings andnorms implicit in these practices are not just in theminds of the actors but are out there in the practicesthemselves, practices which cannot be conceived as a setof individual actions, but which are essentially modes ofsocial relation, of mutual action.

The actors may have all sorts of beliefs and attitudeswhich may be rightly thought of as their individualbeliefs and attitudes, even if others share them; theymay subscribe to certain policy goals or certain forms of

theory about the polity, or feel resentment at certainthings, and so on. They bring these with them into theirnegotiations, and strive to satisfy them. But what theydo not bring into the negotiations is the set of ideas andnorms constitutive of negotiation themselves. These mustbe the common property of the society before there canbe any question of anyone entering into negotiation ornot. Hence they are not subjective meanings, theproperty of one or some individuals, but ratherintersubjective meanings, which are constitutive of thesocial matrix in which individuals find themselves andact.

The intersubjective meanings which are theback round to social action are often treated b olitical

either one or the other is a certain set of common termsof reference. A society in which this was lacking wouldnot be a society in the normal sense of the term, butseveral. Perhaps some multiracial or multi-tribal statesapproach this limit. Some multinational states arebedevilled by consistent cross-purposes, e.g., my owncountry. But consensus as a convergence of beliefs orvalues

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28 CHARLES TAYLOR

is not the opposite of this kind of fundamental diversity,Rather the opposite of diversity is a high degree of intersubjective meanings. And this can go along withprofound cleavage. Indeed, intersubjective meanings area condition of a certain kind of very profound cleavage,such as was visible in the Reformation, or the AmericanCivil War, or splits in left wing parties, where thedispute is at fever pitch just because both sides can fullyunderstand the other.

In other words, convergence of belief or attitude orits absence presupposes a common language in whichthese beliefs can be formulated, and in which theseformulations can be opposed. Much of this commonlanguage in any society is rooted in its institutions andpractices; it is constitutive of these institutions andpractices. It is part of the intersubjective meanings. Toput the point another way, apart from the question ofhow much peoples beliefs converge is the question ofhow much they have a common language of social andpolitical reality in which these beliefs are expressed.This second question cannot be reduced to the first;intersubjective meaning is not a matter of convergingbeliefs or values. When we speak of consensus we speak

of beliefs and values which could be the property of asingle person, or many, or all; but intersubjectivemeanings could not be the property of a single personbecause they are rooted in social practice.

We can perhaps see this if we envisage the situationin which the ideas and norms underlying a practice arethe property of single individuals. This is what happenswhen single individuals from one society interiorize thenotions and values of another, e.g., children inmissionary schools. Here we have a totally differentsituation. We are really talking now about subjectivebeliefs and attitudes. The ideas are abstract, they aremere social ideals. Whereas in the original society,these ideas and norms are rooted in their social relations,



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meaning, the social practice of negotiation as it is livedin our society. The rejection wouldnt have the bitterquality it has if what is rejected were not understood incommon, because it is part of a social practice which wefind it hard to avoid, so pervasive is it in our society.At the same time there is a reaching out for other formswhich have still the abstract quality of ideals whichare subjective in this sense, that is, not rooted inpractice; which is what makes the rebellion look sounreal to outsiders, and so irrational.

iii

Inter subjective meanings, ways of experiencingaction in society which are expressed in the languageand descriptions constitutive of institutions and practices,do not fit into the categorial grid of mainstream politicalscience. This allows only for an intersubjective realitywhich is brute data identifiable. But social practices andinstitutions which are partly constituted by certain waysof talking about them are not so identifiable. We have tounderstand the language, the underlying meanings, whichconstitute them.

We can allow, once we accept a certain set of

institutions or practices as our starting point and not asobjects of further questioning, that we can easily take asbrute data that certain acts are judged to take place orcertain states judged to hold within the semantic field ofthese practices. For instance, that someone has votedLiberal, or signed the petition. We can then go on tocorrelate certain subjective meaningsbeliefs, attitudes,etc.with this behavior or its lack. But this means thatwe give up trying to define further just what thesepractices and institutions are, what the meanings arewhich they require and hence sustain. For thesemeanings do not fit into the grid; they are not subjectivebeliefs or values, but are constitutive of social reality. Inorder to get at them we have to drop the basic premiss

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30 CHARLES TAYLOR

brute data, but that as inter subjective they areconstitutive of this reality.

We have been talking here of intersubjectivemeanings. And earlier I was contrasting the question ofinter subjective meaning with that of consensus asconvergence of opinions. But there is another kind ofnonsubjective meaning which is also often inadequatelydiscussed under the head of consensus. In a societywith a strong web of intersubjective meanings, there canbe a more or less powerful set of common meanings. Bythese I mean notions of what is significant which are not

just shared in the sense that everyone has them, but arealso common in the sense of being in the commonreference world. Thus, almost everyone in our societymay share a susceptibility to a certain kind of femininebeauty, but this may not be a common meaning. It maybe known to no one, except perhaps market researchers,who play on it in their advertisements. But the survivalof a national identity as francophones is a commonmeaning ofQubcois; for it is not just shared, andnot just known to be shared, but its being a commonaspiration is one of the common reference points of alldebate, communication, and all public life in the society.

We can speak of a shared belief, aspiration, etc.when there is convergence between the subjectivebeliefs, aspirations, of many individuals. But it is part ofthe meaning of a common aspiration, belief, celebration,etc. that it be not just shared but part of the commonreference world. Or to put it another way, its being shar-ed is a collective act, it is a consciousness which iscommunally sustained, whereas sharing is something wedo each on his own, as it were, even if each of us isinfluenced by the others.

Common meanings are the basis of community.

Intersubjective meaning gives a people a commonlanguage to talk about social reality and a common



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shared. But what is required for common meanings isthat this shared value be part of the common world,that this sharing be shared. But we could also say thatcommon meanings are quite other than consensus, forthey can subsist with a high degree of cleavage; this iswhat happens when a common meaning comes to belived and understood differently by different groups in asociety. It remains a common meaning, because there isthe reference point which is the common purpose,aspiration, celebration. Such is for example theAmerican Way, or freedom as understood in the USA.But this common meaning is differently articulated by

different groups. This is the basis of the bitterest fightsin a society, and this we are also seeing in the U.S.today. Perhaps one might say that a common meaningis very often the cause of the most bitter lack ofconsensus. It thus must not be confused withconvergence of opinion, value, attitude.

Of course, common meanings and inter subjectivemeanings are closely interwoven. There must be apowerful net of intersubjective meanings for there to becommon meanings; and the result of powerful commonmeanings is the development of a greater web of

intersubjective meanings as people live in community.On the other hand, when common meanings wither,

which they can do through the kind of deep dissensuswe described earlier, the groups tend to grow apart anddevelop different languages of social reality, hence toshare less intersubjective meanings.

Hence, to take our above example again, there hasbeen a powerful common meaning in our civilizationaround a certain vision of the free society in whichbargaining has a central place. This has helped toentrench the social practice of negotiation which makes

us participate in this intersubjective meaning. But thereis a severe challenge to this common meaning today, aswe have seen. Should those who ob ect to it reall

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32 CHARLES TAYLOR

ontology of mainstream social science lacks is the notionof meaning as not simply for an individual subject; of asubject who can be a we as well as an I. Theexclusion of this possibility, of the communal, comesonce again from the baleful influence of theepistemological tradition for which all knowledge has tobe reconstructed from the impressions imprinted on theindividual subject. But if we free ourselves from the holdof these prejudices, this seems a wildly implausible viewabout the development of human consciousness; we areaware of the world through a we before we arethrough an I. Hence we need the distinction between

what is just shared in the sense that each of us has it inour individual worlds, and that which is in the commonworld. But the very idea of something which is in thecommon world in contradistinction to what is in all theindividual worlds is, totally opaque to empiricistepistemology. Hence it finds no place in mainstreamsocial science. What this results in must now be seen.

Ill

i

Thus, to sum up the last pages: a social science

which wishes to fulfill the requirements of the empiricisttradition naturally tries to reconstruct social reality asconsisting of brute data alone. These data are the acts ofpeople (behavior) as identified supposedly beyondinterpretation either by physical descriptions or bydescriptions clearly defined by institutions and practices;and secondly, they include the subjective reality ofindividuals beliefs, attitudes, values, as attested by theirresponses to certain forms of words, or in some casestheir overt non-verbal behavior.

What this excludes is a consideration of social

reality as characterized by inter subjective and commonmeanings. It excludes, for instance, an attempt tounderstand our civilization, in which ne otiation la s



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who would quarrel with our interpretations of thesemeanings.

Thus, I tried to adumbrate above the vision implicitin the practice of negotiation by reference to certainnotions of autonomy and rationality. But this readingwill undoubtedly be challenged by those who havedifferent fundamental conceptions of man, humanmotivation, the human condition; or even by those who

judge other features of our present predicament to havegreater importance. If we wish to avoid these disputes,and have a science grounded in verification as this isunderstood by the logical empiricists, then we have toavoid this level of study altogether and hope to make dowith a correlation of behavior which is brute dataidentifiable.

A similar point goes for the distinction betweencommon meanings and shared subjective meanings. Wecan hope to identify the subjective meanings ofindividuals if we take these in the sense in which thereare adequate criteria for them in peoples dissent orassent to verbal formulae or their brute data indentifiablebehavior. But once we allow the distinction betweensuch subjective meanings which are widely shared andgenuine common meanings, then we can no longer makedo with brute data indentification. We are in a domainwhere our definitions can be challenged by those withanother reading.

The profound option of mainstream social scientistsfor the empiricist conception of knowledge and sciencemakes it inevitable that they should accept theverification model of political science and the categorialprinciples that this entails. This means in turn that astudy of our civilization in terms of its intersubjectiveand common meanings is ruled out. Rather this whole

level of study is made invisible.

On the mainstream view, therefore, the different



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. mon an owe , op. c .lla How is a Comparative Science of Politics Possible?, in Alasdair McIntyre, Against the Self-

Images of the Age, London, 1971.

An influential school of our day has therefore shiftedcomparison to certain practices, or very general classesof practices, and proposes to compare societies accordingto the different ways in which these practices are carriedon. Such are the functions of the influentialdevelopmental approach. 11 But it is episte-mologically crucial that such functions be identifiedindependently of those intersubjective meanings whichare different in different societies; for otherwise, theywill not be genuinely universal; or will be universal onlyin the loose and unilluminating sense that the function-name can be given application in every society but with

varying, and often widely varying meaningthe sameterm being glossed very differently by different sets ofpractices and intersubjective meanings. The danger thatsuch universality might not hold is not even suspectedby mainstream political scientists since they are unawarethat there is such a level of description as that whichdefines intersubjective meanings and are convinced thatfunctions and the various structures which perform themcan be identified in terms of brute data behavior.

But the result of ignoring the difference inintersubjective meanings can be disastrous to a science

of comparative politics, viz., that we interpret all othersocieties in the categories of our own. Ironically, this iswhat seems to have happened to American politicalscience. Having strongly criticized the old institution-focussed comparative politics for its ethnocentricity (orWestern bias), it proposes to understand the politics ofall society in terms of such functions, for instance, asinterest articulation and interest aggregation whosedefinition is strongly influenced by the bargaining cultureof our civilization, but which is far from bein

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ac n yre s ar c e a so con a ns an n eres ng scuss on o eg macy rom a eren , a ougthink related, angle.


two rival approaches in connection with another commonproblem

area of politics. This is the question of what is calledlegiti-

>>12

macy.

ii

It is an obvious fact, with which politics has beenconcerned since at least Plato, that some societies enjoyan easier, more spontaneous cohesion which relies lesson the use of force than others. It has been an importantquestion of political theory to understand what underliesthis difference. Among others, Aristotle. Machiavelli,Montesquieu, de Tocqueville have dealt with it.

Contemporary mainstream political scientistsapproach this question with the concept legitimacy.The use of the word here can be easily understood.Those societies which are more spontaneously cohesivecan be thought to enjoy a greater sense of legitimacyamong their members. But the application of the term

has been shifted. Legitimacy is a term in which wediscuss the authority of the state or polity, its right toour allegiance. However we conceive of this legitimacy,it can only be attributed to a polity in the light of anumber of surrounding conceptionse.g., that itprovides men freedom, that it emanates from their will,that it secures them order, the rule of law, or that it isfounded on tradition, or commands obedience by itssuperior qualities. These conceptions are all such thatthey rely on definitions of what is significant for men in

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ng ewoo s, , oun a on o o ern o ca c ence er es.14 New York, 1963. Page references are to this edition.

36 CHARLES TAYLOR

this analysis is far from firmly established ; no more soin fact than the empiricist paradigm of knowledge itselfwith which it is closely bound up. A challenge to thisparadigm in the name of a hermeneutical science is alsoa challenge to the distinction between descriptive andevaluative and the entire conception of Wertfreiheitwhich goes with it.

In any case, whether because it is evaluative orcan only be applied in connection with definitions ofmeaning, legitimate is not a word which can be usedin the description of social reality according to theconceptions of mainstream social science. It can only beused as a description of subjective meaning. What entersinto scientific consideration is thus not the legitimacy ofa polity but the opinions or feelings of its memberindividuals concerning its legitimacy. The differencesbetween different societies in their manner ofspontaneous cohesion and sense of community are to beunderstood by correlations between the beliefs andfeelings of their members towards them on one hand andthe prevalence of certain brute data identifiable indicesof stability in them on the other.

Thus Robert Dahl in Modern Political Analysis13 (31-2) speaks of the different ways in which leadersgain compliance for their policies. The more citizenscomply because of internal rewards and deprivations,the less leaders need to use external rewards anddeprivations. But if citizens believe a government islegitimate, then their conscience will bind them to obeyit; they will be internally punished if they disobey;hence government will have to use less externalresources, including force.



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15 Histoire du Peuple anglais au xixe sicle, Paris, 1913.16 The Human Condition, New York, 1959.

38 CHARLES TAYLOR

Let us take the winning of the allegiance of theworking class to the new industrial regimes in thenineteenth and early twentieth century. This is far frombeing a matter simply or even perhaps most significantlyof the speed with which this class was integrated intothe political process and the effectiveness of the regime.Rather the consideration of the granting of access to thepolitical process as an independent variable may bemisleading.

It is not just that we often find ourselves invited byhistorians to account for class cohesion in particular

countries in terms of other factors, such as the impact ofMethodism in early nineteenth century England (ElieHalevy) 15 or the draw of Germanys newly successfulnationalism. These factors could be assimilated to thesocial scientists grid by being classed as ideologies orwidely- held value-systems or some other suchconcatenations of subjective meaning.

But perhaps the most important such ideology inaccounting for the cohesion of industrial democraticsocieties has been that of the society of work, the visionof society as a large-scale enterprise of production inwhich widely different functions are integrated intointerdependence; a vision of society in which economicrelations are considered as primary, as it is not only inMarxism (and in a sense not really with Marxism) butabove all with the tradition of Classical Utilitarianism. Inline with this vision there is a fundamental solidaritybetween all members of society that labor (to useArendts language),16 for they are all engaged inproducing what is indispensable to life and happiness infar-reaching interdependence.

This is the ideology which has frequently presided



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us ew s euer n e on c o enera ons, ew or , , a emp s o accoun ormisperception of social reality in the Berkeley student uprising in terms of a generational conflict (pp.

6-470), which in turn is rooted in the psychology of adolescence and attaining adulthood. Yet Feuer himselfhis first chapter notes the comparative recency of selfdefining political generations, a phenomenon whiches from the post-


destructive action, tend to shake the basic categories ofour social science. It is not just that such a developmentwas quite unpredicted by this science, which saw in therise of affluence the cause rather of a furtherentrenching of the bargaining culture, a reduction ofirrational cleavage, an increase of tolerance, in shortthe end of ideology. For prediction, as we shall seebelow, cannot be a goal of social science as it is ofnatural science. It is rather that this mainstream sciencehasnt the categories to explain this breakdown. It isforced to look on extremism either as a bargaininggambit of the desperate, deliberately raising the ante in

order to force a hearing. Or, alternatively, it canrecognize the novelty of the rebellion by accepting thehypothesis that heightened demands are being made onthe system owing to a revolution of expectations, orelse to the eruption of new desires or aspirations whichhitherto had no place in the bargaining process. Butthese new desires or aspirations must be in the domainof individual psychology, that is, they must be such thattheir arousal and satisfaction is to be understood interms of states of individuals rather than in terms of theintersubjective meanings in which they live. For theselatter have no place in the categories of the mainstream,

which thus cannot accommodate a genuine historicalpsychology.

But some of the more extreme protests and acts ofrebellion in our society cannot be interpreted asbargaining gambits in the name of any demands, old ornew. These can only be interpreted within the acceptedframework of our social science as a return to ideology,and hence as irrational. Now in the case of some of the



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42 CHARLES TAYLOR

No one can claim to begin to have an adequateexplanation for these major changes which ourcivilization is undergoing. But in contrast to theincapacity of a science which remains within theaccepted categories, a hermeneutical science of manwhich has a place for a study of intersubjective meaningcan at least begin to explore fruitful avenues. Plainly thediscipline which was integral to the civilization of workand bargaining is beginning to fail. The structures of thiscivilization, interdependent work, bargaining, mutualadjustment of individual ends, are beginning to changetheir meaning for many, and are beginning to be felt not

as normal and best suited to man, but as hateful orempty. And yet we are all caught in these intersubjectivemeanings insofar as we live in this society, and in asense more and more all-pervasively as it progresses.Hence the virulence and tension of the critique of oursociety which is always in some real sense a self-rejection (in a way that the old socialist opposition neverwas).

Why has this set of meanings gone sour? Plainly, wehave to accept that they are not to be understood at theirface value. The free, productive, bargaining culture

claimed to be sufficient for man. If it was not, then wehave to assume that while it did hold our allegiance, italso had other meanings for us which commanded thisallegiance and which have now gone.

This is the starting point of a set of hypotheseswhich attempt to redefine our past in order to make ourpresent and future intelligible. We might think that theproductive, bargaining culture offered in the past

apo eonic era p. . ut an a equate attempt toexp a n t s stor ca s t, w c a ter a un er es t eer e ey rising an many ot ers, wou e ieve ave

to ta e us e on t e am it o in ivi ua s c o o topsyc o- istory, to a stu y o t e intrication opsyc o ogica con ict an intersu jective meanings.

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horizon which was essential to the sense of meaningfulpurpose has collapsed, which would show that like somany other Enlightenment-based dreams the free,productive, bargaining society can only sustain man as agoal, not as a reality.

Or we can look at this development in terms ofidentity. A sense of building their future through thecivilization of work can sustain men as long as they seethemselves as having broken with a millenial past ofinjustice and hardship in order to create qualitativelydifferent conditions for their children. All the require-ments of a humanly acceptable identity can be met bythis predicament, a relation to the past, (one soars aboveit but preserves it in folkloric memory), to the socialworld (the interdependent world of free, productivemen), to the earth (the raw material which awaitsshaping), to the future and ones own death (theeverlasting monument in the lives of prosperouschildren), to the absolute (the absolute values offreedom, integrity, dignity).

But at some point the children will be unable tosustain this forward thrust into the future. This effort hasplaced them in a private haven of security, within whichthey are unable to reach and recover touch with thegreat realities: their parents have only a negated past,lives which have been oriented wholly to the future; thesocial world is distant and without shape; rather one canonly insert oneself into it by taking ones place in thefuture-oriented productive juggernaught. But this nowseems without any sense; the relation to the earth as rawmaterial is therefore experienced as empty andalienating, but the recovery of a valid relation to theearth is the hardest thing once lost; and there is norelation to the absolute where we are caught in the webof meanings which have gone dead for us. Hence past,future, earth, world, and absolute are in some way oranother occluded; and what must arise is an identity

,


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44 CHARLES TAYLOR

most severe among groups which have been but marginalin affluent bargaining societies. These have had thegreatest strain in living in this civilization while theiridentity was in some ways antithetical to it. Such areblacks in the U.S., and the community of French-speaking Canadians, each in different ways. For manyimmigrant groups the strain was also great, but theyforced themselves to surmount the obstacles, and thenew identity is sealed in the blood of the old, as it were.

But for those who would not or could not succeedin thus transforming themselves, but always lived a lifeof strain on the defensive, the breakdown of the central,powerful identity is the trigger to a deep turn-over. Itcan be thought of as a liberation but at the same time itis deeply unsettling, because the basic parameters offormer life are being changed, and there are not yet thenew images and definitions to live a new fullyacceptable identity. In a sense we are in a conditionwhere a new social compact (rather the first socialcompact) has to be made between these groups andthose they live with, and no one knows where to start.

In the last pages, I have presented some hypotheseswhich may appear very speculative; and they may indeedturn out to be without foundation, even without muchinterest. But their aim was mainly illustrative. Myprincipal claim is that we can only come to grips withthis phenomenon of breakdown by trying to understandmore clearly and profoundly the common and intersubjective meanings of the society in which we havebeen living. For it is these which no longer hold us, andto understand this change we have to have an adequategrasp of these meanings. But this we cannot do as longas we remain within the ambit of mainstream socialscience, for it will not recognize intersubjective meaning,and is forced to look at the central ones of our societyas though they were the inescapable background of allpolitical action. Breakdown is thus inexplicable in

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The result might be a psycholobical theory of emotionalmaladjustment, perhaps traced to certain features offamily background, analogous to the theories of theauthoritarian personality and the California F-scale. Butthis would no longer be a political or social theory. Wewould be giving up the attempt to understand thechange in social reality at the level of its constitutive inter subjective meanings.

IY

It can be argued then, that mainstream social science

is kept within certain limits by its categorial principleswhich are rooted in the traditional epistemology ofempiricism; and secondly, that these restrictions are asevere handicap and prevent us from coming to gripswith important problems of our day which should be theobject of political science. We need to go beyond thebounds of a science based on verification to one whichwould study the intersubjective and common meaningsembedded in social reality.

But this science would be hermeneutical in the sensethat has been developed in this paper. It would not be

founded on brute data; its most primitive data would bereadings of meanings, and its object would have thethree properties mentioned above: the meanings are for asubject in a field or fields; they are moreover meaningswhich are partially constituted by self-definitions, whichare in this sense already interpretations, and which canthus be reexpressed or made explicit by a science ofpolitics. In our case, the subject may be a society orcommunity; but the intersubjective meanings, as we saw,embody a certain self-definition, a vision of the agentand his society, which is that of the society or com-munity.

But then the difficulties which the proponents of theverification model foresee will arise. If we have a



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46 CHARLES TAYLOR

generated by our society makes sense and holds togetheronly if one accepts this reading of the intersubjectivemeanings of our society, and if one accepts this readingof the rebellion against our society by many youngpeople (sc. the reading in terms of identity - crisis).These two readings make sense together, so that in asense the explanation as a whole reposes on the readings,and the readings in their turn are strengthened by theexplanation as a whole.

But if these readings seem implausible, or evenmore, if they are not understood by our interlocutor,

there is no verification procedure which we can fall backon. We can only continue to offer interpretations; we arein an interpretative circle.

But the ideal of a science of verification is to findan appeal beyond differences of interpretation. Insightwill always be useful in discovery, but should not haveto play any part in establishing the truth of its findings.This ideal can be said to have been met by our naturalsciences. But a hermeneutic science cannot but rely oninsight. It requires that one have the sensibility andunderstanding necessary to be able to make andcomprehend the readings by which we can explain thereality concerned. In physics we might argue that ifsomeone does not accept a true theory, then either hehas not been shown enough (brute data) evidence(perhaps not enough is yet available), or he cannotunderstand and apply some formalized language. But inthe sciences of man conceived as hermeneutical, thenonacceptance of a true or illuminating theory may comefrom neither of these, indeed is unlikely to be due toeither of these, but rather from a failure to grasp themeaning field in question, an inability to make andunderstand readings of this field.

In other words, in a hermeneutical science, a certainmeasure of insight is indispensable, and this insight

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understand, then your intuitions are at fault, are blind orinadequate, some claims of this form will be justified;that some differences will be nonarbitrable by furtherevidence, but that each side can only make appeal todeeper insight on the part of the other. The superiorityof one position over another will thus consist in this,that from the more adequate position one canunderstand ones own stand and that of ones opponent,but not the other way around. It goes without sayingthat this argument can only have weight for those in thesuperior position.

Thus, a hermeneutical science encounters a gap inintuitions, which is the other side, as it were, of thehermeneutical circle. But the situation is graver thanthis; for this gap is bound up with our divergent optionsin politics and life.

We speak of a gap when some cannot understandthe kind of self-definition which others are proposing asunderlying a certain society or set of institutions. Thussome positivistically-minded thinkers will find thelanguage of identity-theory quite opaque; and somethinkers will not recognize any theory which does not fitwith the categorial presuppositions of empiricism. Butselfdefinitions are not only important to us as scientistswho are trying to understand some, perhaps distant,social reality. As men we are self-defining beings, andwe are partly what we are in virtue of the self-definitions which we have accepted, however we havecome by them. What self-definitions we understand andwhat ones we dont understand, is closely linked withthe self-definitions which help to constitute what we are.If it is too simple to say that one only understands anideology which one subscribes to, it is neverthelesshard to deny that we have great difficulty grasping

definitions whose terms structure the world in wayswhich are utterly different from, incompatible with ourown.

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48 CHARLES TAYLOR

understand which takes the form, not only developyour intuitions, but more radically change yourself.This puts an end to any aspiration to a value-free orideology-free science of man. A study of the scienceof man is inseparable from an examination of theoptions between which men must choose.

This means that we can speak here not only of error,but of illusion. We speak of illusion when we aredealing with something of greater substance than error,error which in a sense builds a counterfeit reality of itsown. But errors of interpretation of meaning, which are

also self-definitions of those who interpret and henceinform their lives, are more than errors in this sense:they are sustained by certain practices of which they areconstitutive. It is not implausible to single out asexamples two rampant illusions in our present society.One is that of the proponents of the bargaining societywho can recognize nothing but either bargaining gambitsor madness in those who rebel against this society. Herethe error is sustained by the practices of the bargainingculture, and given a semblance of reality by the refusalto treat any protests on other terms; it hence acquires themore substantive reality of illusion. The second example

is provided by much revolutionary activity in oursociety which in desperate search for an alternative modeof life purports to see its situation in that of an Andeanguerilla or Chinese peasants. Lived out, this passes fromthe stage of laughable error to tragic illusion. Oneillusion cannot recognize the possibility of humanvariation, the other cannot see any limits to mans abilityto transform itself. Both make a valid science of manimpossible.

In face of all this, we might be so scandalized bythe prospect of such a hermeneutical science, that we

will want to go back to the verification model. Why canwe not take our understanding of meaning as part of the



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impossible. This, for three reasons of ascending order offundamentalness.

The first is the well-known open systempredicament, one shared by human life and meteorology,that we cannot shield a certain domain of human events,the psychological, economic, political, from externalinterference; it is impossible to delineate a closedsystem.

The second, more fundamental, is that if we are tounderstand men by a science of interpretation, we cannotachieve the degree of fine exactitude of a science based

on brute data. The data of natural science admit ofmeasurement to virtually any degree of exactitude. Butdifferent interpretations cannot be judged in this way. Atthe same time different nuances of interpretation maylead to different predictions in some circumstances, andthese different outcomes may eventually create widelyvarying futures. Hence it is more than easy to be wideof the mark.

But the third and most fundamental reason for theimposibility of hard prediction is that man is a self-defining animal. With changes in his self-definition go

changes in what man is, such that he has to beunderstood in different terms. But the conceptualmutations in human history can and frequently doproduce conceptual webs which are incommensurable,that is, where the terms can't be defined in relation to acommon stratum of expressions. The entirely differentnotions of bargaining in our society and in someprimitive ones provide an example. Each will be glossedin terms of practices, institutions, ideas in each societywhich have nothing corresponding to them in the other.

The success of prediction in the natural sciences is

bound up with the fact that all states of the system, pastand future, can be described in the same range ofconce ts as values sa of the same variables. Hence



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50 CHARLES TAYLOR

The very terms in which the future will have to becharacterized if we are to understand it properly are notall available to us at present. Hence we have suchradically unpredictable events as the culture of youthtoday, the Puritan rebellion of the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, the development of Soviet society,etc.

And thus, it is much easier to understand after thefact than it is to predict. Human science is largely ex

post understanding. Or often one has the sense ofimpending change, of some big reorganization, but ispowerless to make clear what it will consist in: onelacks the vocabulary. But there is a clear assymetry here,which there is not (or not supposed to be) in naturalscience, where events are said to be predicted from thetheory with exactly the same ease with which oneexplains past events and by exactly the same process. Inhuman science this will never be the case.

Of course, we strive ex post to understand thechanges, and to do this we try to develop a language inwhich we can situate the incommensurable webs ofconcepts. We see the rise of Puritanism, for instance, asa shift in mans stance to the sacred; and thus, we havea language in which we can express both stancestheearlier mediaeval Catholic one and the Puritan rebellionas glosses on this fundamental term. We thus havea language in which to talk of the transition. But thinkhow we acquired it. This general category of the sacredis acquired not only from our experience of the shiftwhich came in the Reformation, but from the study ofhuman religion in general, including primitive religion,and with the detachment which came with secularization.It would be conceivable, but unthinkable, that amediaeval Catholic could have this conceptionor forthat matter a Puritan. These two protagonists only had alanguage of condemnation for each other: heretic,idol&tor. The place for such a concept was pre-empted

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for instance, which is treated several times at thebeginning of the modern era. There is a kind ofprophesy here, a premonition. But what characterizesthese bursts of foresight is that they see through a glassdarkly, for they see in terms of the old language: Faustsells his soul to the devil. They are in no sense hardpredictions. Human science looks backward. It isinescapably historical.

There are thus good grounds both in epistemologicalarguments and in their greater fruitfulness for opting forhermeneutical sciences of man. But we cannot hide fromourselves how greatly this option breaks with certain

commonly held notions about our scientific tradition. Wecan not measure such sciences against the requirementsof a science of verification: we cannot judge them bytheir predictive capacity. We have to accept that theyare founded on intuitions which all do not share, andwhat is worse that these intuitions are closely bound upwith our fundamental options. These sciences cannot bewertfrei; they are moral sciences in a more radicalsense than the eighteenth century understood. Finally,their successful prosecution requires a high degree ofself-knowledge, a freedom from illusion, in the sense oferror which is rooted and expressed in ones way of life;for our inca acit to understand is rooted in our own

charles taylor intepretation and the sciences of man

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