Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers 2
Questions & Answers #3: "Social Theory as Practice"

Echoes from T. Kuhn: "My claim is that the activities of searching for, creating, espousing & rejecting theories are too little understood," 91. It is obvious that T. believes that a better understanding can be had by recourse to a pragmatic epistemology.

1. How does social theory arise?

T.'s answer is typically pragmatic: "social theory arises when we try to formulate explicitly what we are doing," 93. "The stronger motive for making & adopting theories is the sense that our implicit understanding is . . . crucially inadequate or even wrong," 94. Cf. to Kuhn's anomalies. We have 2 "versions": an operational version with an "implicit understanding" [model]; & a candidate for substitution, which is attractive because it promises to solve the anomaly by explaining what is going on at a theoretically deeper level. Trust T. to point out that this involves 2 subjective accounts: in #1, what I feel/think is going on; & in #2, what the substitutional model says is going on. Note that these may be optional versions for one person: e.g., I may be involved in a conversation & consequently have an immediate sense of the event, which I may alternatively analyze for underlying medical or psychological evidence. Notice the difference between reductionist substitutions, which attempt to replace #1 by #2 & pragmatist versions, which remain optional as different views.

2. On 96 T. talks about social goods: "part of what makes it a good is precisely that it is shared." How does this understanding oppose reductive/substitutional schemes?

Substitutional accounts dismiss the felt experience of the original account as irrelevant. Consequently they cannot recognize public, nor performative goods. In civic humanism, "the laws are significantly not qua mine, but qua ours." * * * "The laws are important because they are ours. . . . Their being ours is a matter of our recognizing them as such together, in public space," & this meaningfulness cannot be substituted for with some theoretical term. "That the significance is shared [in the public sphere] is a crucial part of what" makes them valuable. The result of this line of thinking is to never accept the necessarily false promise of the reductionist who claims that nothing is lost in accepting the theoretical substitute. Plato promises that what is left behind is merely the gross. Whereas pragmatists claim that all substitutional abstractions must necessarily originate from the original embodied experience. Theories can never be more than optional views of that experience.

3. On 98 T. claims that social science theory is disanalogous with physical science theory. How so?

In the physical sciences the "felt experience" level which originally constitutes the phenomena (as political, moral, aesthetic, etc.) is missing, destroyed or overlayed by the substitutional account. "The case is different here, because the common-sense view [the original] which theory upsets [by substituting its own version] . . . plays a crucial, constitutive role" in social science. . . . The theory is not about an [putatively] independent object, but one that is partly constituted by self-understanding." This happens doubly. There are Kant's categories of thought which qualifies all discourse/knowledge as phenomenological, but T. has in mind something like the rules of chess which define what the game is. Obviously such rules/definitions are entirely social. Suppose, now, someone says that we have been playing the game entirely wrong; or that our understanding of the game is laughably simple. She then demonstrates how Mr. Spok plays 3-D chess. Where is the epistemological firm ground to defend our paradigm model of how to play chess? "Thus a challenging theory can . . . undermine a practice, by showing that its essential distinctions are bogus, or have a quite different meaning," 98.

Once a practice is "exteriorized" or theoretically described, we have symmetry. E.g., every sport has judges & connoisseurs who are expert in meticulously matching a given performance against a theoretical idealization. That familiar symmetry is destroyed & not yet replaced & available in the 2^nd theory. "The disruptive consequences of the [second theory which hopes to replace the first theory] theory flow from the nature of the practice, in that one of its constitutive props has been knocked away." In a sense, we don't know how to act/perform because we question the adequacy of the paradigm sense of order. "This is because the practice requires certain descriptions to make sense, & it is these that the theory undermines," 98. Americans should be perfectly familiar with this in the areas of colonialism and cross-cultural sensitivity.

4. This essay seems to be going in the direction of T. Kuhn: that discourse communities are ultimately incommensurate & untranslatable. "On one hand, we have an atomist model" or utilitarianism "which sees society as" the actions of "independent agents with their individual goals." * * * "Quite different from that would a republican model, issuing from one of the theories of shared goods." Why doesn't T. end up with Kuhn (& probably Rorty) recognizing numerous, discrete discourse communities?

Kuhn & Rorty take the "linguistic turn"; T. takes the pragmatist turn. By that I mean to suggest that Kuhn & Rorty imagine that a game is 100% defined by texts. It (e.g., politics, law, religion) means what the relevant text/s says. We do not easily recognize that 2 things are going on here: the felt experience of playing the game & the set of rules. When we start talking about how to play the game, we generally substitute the 2^nd for the 1^st. T. reminds us that this priority is in fact reversed; it would not be possible to refine the rules in the absence of the original experience. In the example of American political parties (Democrats & Republicans), T. reminds us that texts like the respective party platforms only make sense as refinements of political experience that is inclusive of both parties. Moreover, the common cultural experience, which the theorists find transparent & consequently deny is even there, is the product of centuries & millions of performances in contradistinction to the historically thin account offered by any recent theory. In regard to economics (Marx vs. Adam Smith): "But it took a whole vast development of civilization before the culture developed in which people do so behave [as capitalists, consumers, etc. - these are culturally defined & learned identities], in which it became a cultural possibility to act like this [instead of being dismissed as crazy or inexplicable]; & in which the discipline involved in so acting became wide-spread enough for this behaviour to be generalized [so that it could be theoretically recognized]. & it took the development of a host of institutions, money, banks, international markets, & so on, before behaviour of this form could assume the scale it has. Economics can aspire to the status of a science . . . [only because it assumes all of this huge cultural development as obvious or universal; only] because there has developed a culture in which a certain form of rationality is a (if not the) dominant value," 103. We argue so vehemently between, e.g., Marxism & capitalism, precisely because each side has recourse to the same or very similar economic experience. Consequently, "Rather than being [objective, logical positivist, Platonic] theories of how things always [necessarily/causally] operate, they actually end up strengthening one way of acting over others."

5. "What is it for a theory to be right?" 104.

We recall Kuhn's point that "each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defense" (94), so typically the fundamentalist Christian does not really hear nor understand the evolutionary biologist's data. Rather he knows what this "means" within his discourse community. We also know Kuhn/Rousseau's point, that there is no more sovereign authority for any community than the consensus articulated by an esteemed leader (Nobel laureate, etc.). In a chapter on education (13), Kuhn suggests that science education relies on the ability to apply a well-mastered theory to novel circumstances whereas humanistic education is largely allusive. One text reminds us of another, which reminds us of another, etc. Perhaps this is why T. does not want to talk about paradigm models as authoritative, but instead talks about how "A founding [social] myth, or our public ceremonial, expresses in public space our common ends, or shared goods, without which we would be incapable of acting together in the way our institutions call for," 105. I can't avoid commenting about how thoroughly Confucian this is. The greatest worry a Japanese has is to not know the part he is expected to play in a social situation, of literally not having a place to stand in this (social) world. "In these ritual activities [which includes not only every social situation in this world, but many which affect the spirit world], each participant would have his proper place, his wei. If one did not understand the ritual procedures, he would literally not know where to stand (li)," (Hall & Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, 86). "As Robert Gimello observes: . . . the li themselves came to be regarded . . . as paradigms of human relations" (H&A 87), i.e., as exemplary & authoritative performances. Does Michael Jordan play basketball correctly? How do you know? The answer is not found in a rule book, nor "stats"; the answer is that his performance is recognized as authoritative by everyone who knows the game.

6. Okay, let's say I accept the Confucian/pragmatic answer about authority: that to know how to play basketball I need to watch Michael Jordan, "The Dream," & few dozen other masters demonstrate the event. Why do we need rule-books, stats, coaches & theory?

Breadth: in the absence of original performative knowledge, texts conserve & disseminate huge amounts of abstract information. Depth: "to submit our discourse of self-understanding to the special disciplines of objectivity, rigour, & respect for truth." Thirdly, Westerners are addicted: "Ours is a very theoretical civilization." Fourthly, specialization pays narrow but often spectacular results. But it runs into the problem of advertising: who knows such expertise is available? Texts provide Yellow Pages.

Let's see where T. ends up in this essay. "To test the [any] theory in practice means here not to see how well the theory describes the practices as a range of independent entities [which do not exist]; but rather to judge how practices fare when informed by the theory" (113), i.e., to ask if Michael Jordan's performance is improved by coaching. If not, we should discard the theory instead of deferring to the theoretician's request for "a little more time & money." This model keeps the priority between original experience & theoretical refinement in tact. "My claim is then that testing theories in practice plays an essential part in validating social theories." How else could they be tested? "For in fact disputes about self-definition [original experience] are inextricably bound up with questions of [theoretical] explanation, & vice versa."

On to #4: "Understanding & Ethnocentricity"
Nov. 96