Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers 2
Questions & Answers #4: "Understanding & Ethnocentricity "

1. What is the test for a social science model? How can we distinguish a good from a bad model?

The test for social science: "an adequate account of human action must make the agents more understandable." It is insufficient for a system to "just predict, or allow us to derive, the actual pattern of social or historical events . . . . A satisfactory explanation must also make sense of the agents," 116. I.e., make sense of their subjective life experience so that we recognize the meaningfulness of that experience. "We come to see how as agents - i.e., beings who act, have purposes, desires - they came to do what they did," 117.

2. What should we think when learning a new social science model, which attributes reasons & causes to people that they themselves are unaware of?

We should be very suspicious because the ontology of "experience" & "interpretation" threatens to be inverted so that the theoretician arbitrarily decides what is meaningful rather than the subject. "My contention has been that social theory has to take subjects as agents of self-definition, whose practice is shaped by their understanding," 117. We can do more than this, but we cannot subvert or replace this & still assert that we are validly interpreting their behavior. Our performance overlays & obscures theirs. "The kind of understanding we are looking for is what we could call 'human understanding," 118. This is not entirely the same thing as empathy, because there the focal point is how "I" feel. "What we are talking about here is discursive understanding," 118. The experience must make sense by accessing the view/vocabulary of the agent/subject, because some of what he feels, desires, etc., will be formulated by that vocabulary.

3. This seems primitive. Anthropology or political science can do no more than record. Does it have no right to interpret?

"In the normal case what is demanded of a theoretical account is that it make the agent's doings clearer than they were to him." * * * "But the need to challenge the agent's self-descriptions [by offering optional or supplemental views] does not take away in the least from the requirement that we understand him as an agent," 118. "Interpretive social science requires that we master the agent's self-description . . . but it by no means requires that we couch our explanantia in the same language."

However, the critic must be self-consciously cautious in order not to assume that her explanantia is transcendental or absolute. Both views are cultural/social. "For those descriptions are culturally specific. The values of one culture are frequently not replicable in another; we can find nothing exactly corresponding to them," the terms "are incommensurable, that is, [each has] . . . no exact translation in other languages," 120. The easy temptation is to reframe or rearticulate what we think was going on in the vocabulary in which we are fluent, i.e., to make a substitution: "it is naturally tempting to try to finesse this understanding," 121. And "the attempt to finesse understanding in this way is futile."

4. Consider the attempt by Marxist analysis to better explain what was happening in the Reformation, 123. What does T. say the analysis must do to be adequate?

"The challenge to explain details is essential to the validation of this kind of theory. But it is a challenge which cannot be met, except by acquiring an adequate understanding (in our strong sense) of the actions, theologies, ideals, and so on, which we are trying to explain," 123. I.e., by inhabiting the milieu or paradigm of Luther, Calvin, etc. "There is no way to finesse the requirement of understanding," by substituting the putatively more powerful or revealing term. When we do this, we change the data. The charge of tautology can be made here. "Our Marxist . . . historian [tries to] convince us he has explained the detail when he can give a convincing interpretation of it in his canonical terms. But to give a convincing interpretation, one has to show that one has understood what the agent is doing, feeling here," not run roughshod over them by immediately claiming that the agent suffered under an illusion. Theories which redefined life as essentially illusory invert the elements of pragmatic epistemology. For it is the agent's experience that is in need of interpretative clarification, not wholesale redefinition or replacement. If we fail to respect this ontology, we end up with a "speculative rational reconstruction . . . but [have] no way of showing that it actually explains anything," but its own theoretical presumptions, 124.

5. How is this related to colonialism, racism, Nazism, science-as-tyranny, etc.?

When social science is unconscious of its presumptions &/or confident of its Enlightenment era status as absolute/universal instead of a cultural view, it becomes moral/political: "social science as correcting everyday understanding" in which "scientists of a dominant culture . . . 'correct' the self-understandings of the less dominant ones by substituting their own [versions]. What is really going on then becomes simply what we can recognize in our own terms; and their self-descriptions are wrong to the extent that they deviate from ours," 124. Missionaries, apologetic, colonialists - anthropology carries on the same epistemological presumption, even if it is more polite. "We have only to think of theories like that of Sir James Frazer, which portrayed primitive magic as a kind of . . . mistaken technology," 125. Joseph Needham's voluminous work, titled Science & Civilisation in China, is open to similar question. T. Kuhn says science was invented by Europe in the last 400 years. To project something like our current understanding of science on the outlook & concerns of ancient Chinese is, at the very least, open to question.

6. So once again we seem to have wandered into T. Kuhn's monad-like discourse communities, each of which is ultimately incommensurable with the others. How does T. get us out of this cul-de-sac?

"The error in this view is to hold that the language of a cross-cultural theory has to be either theirs or ours. * * * In fact . . . the adequate language in which we can understand another society is not our language of understanding, or their, but rather what one could call a language of perspicuous contrast. This would be a language in which we could formulate both their way of life & ours as alternative possibilities in relation to some human constants at work in both [viz., embodied experience]. It would be a language in which the possible human [cultural] variations would be formulated" as alternatives or options, 125.

"This conception of contrast . . . avoids the pitfalls of the incorrigibility thesis [the presumption that the agent's language is expressive instead of discursive: e.g., "the tribe dances to recover its sense of the important meanings it lives by in face of . . . drought, rather than seeing the dance as a mechanism to bring on rain," 127]. Our account does not have to be in the language of understanding of the agents' society, but rather in the language of contrast [cf. alterity] . & the agents' language clearly is not taken as incorrigible [or absolute]. At the same time, we are not committed to an ethnocentric course," 126.

7. So if T. says that the behavior of tribal dance is neither properly interpreted by overlaying our cultural values on theirs (such that we think they are using a botched technique to make it rain) nor by the patronizing belief that it is merely aesthetic &/or athletic, what is going on, according to T.?

"To understand the magical practices of some primitive societies might be to see them not through the disjunction, either proto-technology [assuming an Enlightenment style universal science] or expressive activity, but rather as partaking of a mode of activity in which this kind of clear [theoretical] separation & segregation is not yet made," 128. It is precisely that primal experience which gives rise to the possibility of various theories. This reminds us of how psychoanalytic theory hopes to "translate" the unconscious, but without Freud's presumption that the psychoanalytic method somehow transcended the status of culture.

8. Colonialism vs. multi-culturalism. Explain how T. believes that doing his brand of anthropology avoids the first & fosters the second.

"The language of perspicuous contrast . . . also forces us to redescribe what we are doing. * * * We are always in danger of seeing our ways of acting & thinking as the only conceivable ones. That is exactly what ethnocentricity consists in. Understanding other societies ought to wrench us out of this; it ought to alter our self-understanding," 129. "Understanding another society can make us challenge our self-definitions," 131.

9. T. says that in addition to being wrong (failing to truly explain what it must), social science conceived as physical science is dangerous. We easily see how as colonialism it endangers a targeted culture. How does it engender the theoreticians?

"We generate not only bogus explanations & specious knowledge, but we also encourage ourselves to look for technological solutions to our deepest social problems, which are frequently aggravated by our misguided attempts to manipulate their parameters," 130.

This essay, given as a lecture in Delhi in 1981, ends by suggesting that there is more to be said in the area of colonial studies with evidence from Indian history. T. does not follow in this direction, but returns to American & European social theory, specifically applying this pragmatism to the theory of a liberal, multi-cultural state, which we will find most evident in the third text, Multiculturalism.

On to #6: "Foucault on Freedom & Truth"
Nov. 96