Taylor, Charles

Charles Taylor (b. 1931), Canadian social theorist and philosopher of modernity, is an advocate of the hermeneutic approach to social scientific research and author of the highly regarded Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989). Educated at McGill and Oxford, Taylor combines Anglo-American and Continental philosophies to address problems across the social and human sciences. Most notably, Taylor has offered a sustained critique of the naturalist and reductionist accounts of human behavior that have predominated in modern philosophy and social science. More recently, this critique has addressed the nihilistic implications of postmodern and poststructuralist philosophies. As an alternative for the social sciences, Taylor proposes a hermeneutic understanding of human behavior that valorizes the integrity and agency of persons. Human beings are self-interpreting animals who struggle to articulate their position within culturally constituted frameworks of meaning and moral worth. In elaborating this perspective, Taylor has written on issues of broad concern to the social sciences, including epistemology, ethics, language, the self, multiculturalism, the liberal-communitarian debate in political philosophy, and religion. Taylor situates his project within the tradition of philosophical anthropology, indicating his interest in tracing the history of the changing conceptions of human nature in Western philosophy and culture. Although this philosophical anthropology is most clearly exemplified in Sources of the Self, its influence on Taylor's method of research and style of argument is also apparent in shorter essays such as his often-cited “The Politics of Recognition” (1994). Taylor is also recognized as an interpreter of the German idealist philosopher Georg Hegel and a commentator on Canadian politics, especially on the question of Quebec's sovereignty within Canada.

Taylor's critique of reductionist social science extends as far back as his first book, The Explanation of Behavior (1964), in which he criticizes behaviorist psychology for its efforts to explain human behavior through the lawlike statements exemplified in the natural sciences. In the 1970s and the 1980s, he extended this critique to cognitive psychological and neurophysiological explanations of behavior. Similarly, in “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” (1971), Taylor finds fault in the kind of political science scholarship that reduces the shared meanings contained in political cultures to the interests of atomistic individuals. Common to these social sciences is the expectation that reductive theories provide explanations of human behavior that can be verified against empirical evidence. This hope, Taylor claims, is dangerously misplaced, because it leads to the elaboration of sciences that cannot help us to understand important aspects of human life. In this respect, Taylor shares much in common with postmodern and poststructuralist authors who aim to deconstruct the scientistic, foundationalist, and individualistic bias of Western thought. However, even as he sympathizes with authors such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Taylor argues that poststructuralism reproduces the epistemological errors of Western philosophy by ignoring the integrity of lived personal experience. As such, Taylor advocates a hermeneutic epistemology in which the self-possessed interpretive capacities of human beings assume center stage. Human beings are self-interpreting animals who understand and reflect on the meaning of their lives and their relations to other people. This kind of self-interpretive activity is not based on a priori epistemological principles but on practical knowledge and everyday encounters with cultural frameworks. Furthermore, Taylor marks himself as a philosopher of morality by arguing that interpretation necessarily involves evaluations of moral worth. Human beings are not simply self-interpreters, but they are the kind of interpreters for whom things matter. Precisely what matters is worked [Page 828]out as individuals articulate their position within the moral spaces constituted by historical communities.

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