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Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (1995)
Notes, Questions & Answers & #3: "Explanation & Practical Reason"

This is a fairly difficult & lengthy essay, which does not disclose the point or thesis until the end. As a pragmatist T. is always opposed to those who believe in absolutes/transcendentals. But his argument is less with those who believe that their community's way of doing things is the only right way & that outsiders/foreigners are less than human. Instead his argument is with the polar opposite position: the Romantic view that considers any way of life is as good as any other way (relativism). Must we choose one or the other position? T. says no. We should not allow people to say, "you can't possible understand because you are not, e.g., a woman or black or whatever." Reason is not the transcendental process that Kant thought it was. It does not transcend culture; it is an expression of culture. Reason does provide transitions among various discourse communities & we should be very reluctant to give up on it in order to accept relativism &/or Thomas Kuhn's notion of incommensurate communities, which have nothing in common with each other nor, evidently, with a more comprehensive society.

In case you missed the link, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

1. T. says "The task of [moral] reasoning, then, is not to disprove some radically opposed first premise" (36), but to argue what?

You answer this one (1). Provide a quote & an explication.

2. T. rejects Existentialism: "Something is a moral goal of ours not just in virtue of the fact that we are de facto committed to it. It must have a stronger status . . . ," (37). What is this?

"It must have a stronger status, that we see it as demanding, requiring, or calling for this commitment" that we have made." ". . . A strongly evaluated goal is one such that, were we to cease desiring it, we would be shown up as insensitive or brutish or morally perverse" or simply lacking. Very Confucian.  Notice the social authority. Of course the Existentialist would profess not to care what anyone else thinks but this is disingenuous because Existential ethics offers an argument. It is one of a number of ethical views. It is involved in the discourse community of ethics.

Note: T. identifies a root problem with Utilitarian ethics. Bentham (followed by Freud) said that human behavior is entirely determined by the desire to avoid pain & experience pleasure. Every judgment & decision can & should be traced to this ineluctable drive. This is the sole transcendental/absolute value/principle for utilitarianism. Ethical reasoning must begin from this foundation. All human acts are, in principle (a priori) neutral; neither good nor bad. Moral acts produce pleasure or pain. If an act produces pain, it is evil. If it produces pleasure, it is good. Many of us think that Bentham's outlook is overly reductionistic. "We feel that just showing that we always desire something, even that we can't help desiring it, by itself does nothing to show that we ought to desire it, that it is a moral goal," 37.

Read closely the last dozen lines on 37. ". . . we would have demonstrated that we can't be lucid about ourselves [why we act as we do] without acknowledging that we value this end." Notice that this is subjective; a personal focal point, which cannot be rendered objectively as a number (cash, physics formulas, etc.). Notice also that the authority for this position is not Existential (the radical, lone individual as individual), but the discourse community that provides language, focal concerns, & audience.

3. Now let's follow the implied problem. Since the 17th c., "the model for all explanation & understanding is" what?

Natural science; Newtonian clockwork mechanics.

And what is the problem with this?

That every atomic bit/byte is equally meaningful or meaningless: it "offers us a neutral [valueless/meaningless] universe; it has no place for intrinsic worth or goals that make a [human] claim on us," 38. This model provides a determinative explanation of physical events, each of which is identically meaningful or rather meaningless. Humanistic judgments of what is important are invalid being mere expressions of taste or opinion. Newton's mechanistic terms & functions simply do not allow these to count for anything. The universe can be explained but not understood.

Again the recursive pragmatic question arises: does this model provide a useful technique to perform some (human) function? Or do we believe, as Newton said, that it provides a clear window through which Nature discloses its inherent/transcendental order (explaining what God had in mind when he created the machine of the universe)?

Because this provided the paradigm model for explanation, "Utilitarianism was partly motivated by the aspiration to build an ethic that would be compatible with this scientific vision" or paradigm, 38. T. implies the same flaw: that Util. ethics may plausibly explain behavior mathematically (as in economics) but it fails to provide a vocabulary to understand the subjective processes of falling in love, being patriotic, or other acts of valuation.

4. What justification is there for the contemporary Western "metaphysical bias in favor of a neutral universe [which] overrules [models that provide] our most lucid self-understanding" (39)?

T. implies that there is no justification: ". . . we cannot understand ourselves, or each other, cannot make sense of our lives or determine what to do, without accepting a richer ontology than naturalism allows."

Notice the implication at the bottom of p. 39. If, as T. has argued, science (objective explanation) is incapable of understanding human judgments/choices, then ethics (e.g., Util.) construed as determinative/causal predictions (i.e., as science) must fail for the same reason. It (mis)construes human agents as robots mechanically responding to forces & chemicals invisible to normal experience, which is erased/discounted as uninformed & superficial.

5. Since Descartes, how does one check knowledge claims? "By breaking them down & identifying" what (40)?

"Their ultimate [theoretical] foundations." Notice that this relies on a transformational substitution. Instead of repeating the experience or recalling it, the experience is redescribed using a powerfully theoretical (Cartesian), transformational terminology (often mathematical). Theory is substituted for the experience. Often there are 3 steps: the experience; the common language description of the experience; the scientific/mathematical redescription of the common language description. Moreover, this process is normative. The 3rd formulation is (Platonically) considered to be superior to the other two.

6. In Enlightenment thinking (which fought against the presumption of transcendental authority claimed by the church & the crown) "Foundationalist reasoning [was or] is meant to" do what?

You answer this one (2).

7. What is "one of the strongest appeals of Util. & one the greatest sources of self-congratulations by partisans of utility" (41)?

Shaking us loose from our parochially human way of evaluating experience (as if there was any other way), Util., together with Newtonian physics, promised to give us a universal view; and once we know the bare truth up to the present best scientific account (T. quoting J.S. Mill), "the corollaries from the principle of utility . . . admit of indefinite [progressive] improvement."

Read carefully the last paragraph on p. 41: "The problem [with reasoned arguments about ethical choices] lies with the . . . assumption that [objective] 'criteria' [as Platonic principles/Forms or dictates from God] . . . are what the argument needs" in order to be decided in a fashion resembling a physics argument about empirical phenomena & what is causally at work. The short, pragmatic point reminds us that such criteria as a priori Forms/principles do not exist. What exists are human, social judgments.

8. (pp.44-47). The discussion here asks, how high are the walls around various discourse communities? Sometimes they seem so high that one cannot move from one community to another: e.g., from Christian fundamentalist notions about creation to Darwinism, or as T. seeks to illustrate, from Aristotelian physics to Galileo & Newton. "It can appear that no rational justification of the transitions is possible"; "there are no decisive considerations that both sides must accept," 46.

How plausible is T.'s demand that each paradigm system not only account for relevant phenomena in its domain, but also "give an account of the existence of the other" rival systems, 46? Is this possible? Isn't such paraphrase or substitution exactly what he objects to earlier, in the instance of mechanistic/reductionistic science paraphrasing what is going on ethically?

You answer this one (3).

9. Climbing over the walls of paradigm/discourse communities T. writes, "Beyond a certain point, you just can't pretend any longer that manipulation & control are not relevant criteria to scientific success," 47. The implication is that the focal point for both Aristotelian & Galileo's physics were/are similar or at least translatable. Why is this an important issue? Think of other discourse communities. Consider the false dilemma that either we assent to a priori absolutes or anything goes.

T. presumes that a discourse community (e.g. religion) is not absolutely free to arbitrarily make definitions & interpret experience. Something spills over & will not be contained. However, this is not because it is transcendentally the Truth. As a pragmatist T. will claim that this something is universal because it is potentially experienced by every normal (i.e., not blind at birth, etc.) human being. We universally share embodied experience. This is very important because it will allow T. to claim a ground for ethics that avoids the false dilemma of absolute (transcendental) vs. arbitrary (individual will-to-power).

51-3. Perhaps this is too obvious to mention, but notice the shift from exterior/objective explanation models to subjective/understanding models; from physics to psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, & literary criticism.

55. Another obvious point, the thesis of the essay: "We shouldn't give up on reason too early. We don't need to be so intimidated by distance & [cultural] incomprehensibility that we take them as sufficient grounds to adopt relativism." Do you see where T. is going? Lowering the walls; away from violent conflicts like those in Ireland, the Balkans, etc. Granted that we have many diverse ethnic groups in America, nonetheless what we have in common is greater than what separates us. What we have in common is open to protracted discussion; not exclusively oriented towards tolerance. Reasoned judgments ("transitions") are definitely possible. Moreover, these should not be as easily written off by relativistic comments -- "you're just prejudiced; that's just bias; that's racism" -- as they currently are. There needs to be a much larger area between the equally closed-minded (or intuitive) positions of absolutism & relativism. Taylor consistently argues for this public space of civility as more important than fanatical dedication to Truth.

Notice T.'s commitment to a pragmatic view of 58-9. He argues that life confined to a single fundamentalist discourse community (Christianity, Islam, Communism, etc.) suffers in comparison to a diverse society that offers scores or hundreds of voluntary, limited discourse communities: "to understand some small subset of the range of cultures [discourse communities] . . . is to have a truer grasp of the human condition than those for whom alternative ways are utterly inconceivable" & evil; not worthy of the effort to try to understand, 59.


On to #4: "Parallels Between Heidegger & Wittgenstein"
 09.08.02