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Once hailed as the future of political and social science, the interpretive turn today is at risk of sputtering out. In the twentieth century, an impressive array of philosophers including Hans-Georg Gadamer, R. G. Collingwood, Peter Winch, and Alfred Schutz all made impassioned cases for a social science remade on interpretive grounds.Footnote 1 And yet today the insights of interpretivism are often paid lip service, while the dominant research programs in political science ignore calls for broader methodological reform.Footnote 2 Among political scientists, this neutering of the interpretive turn commonly occurs under the banner of “multi-methods.” So, the most widely read methodological books in political science today assure us that interpretivism may be useful for “soaking and poking” and taking in local color, but that it is nothing like a full-fledged alternative to mainstream social science.Footnote 3 In short, the radical program of the interpretive turn has been largely defanged and demoted—transformed by critics into a footman servicing the very research programs it had once hoped to oust.
Meanwhile, a growing number of critics of mainstream political science have begun to complain that the rejection of the interpretive turn is often based on unfamiliarity with the state of the art in hermeneutic philosophy. For example, Michael Gibbons and Mark Bevir have both argued that political scientists are dealing in straw-men, rejecting the interpretive theories of yesteryear (perhaps attributable to Dilthey or Max Weber) but in no way representative of the cutting edge.Footnote 4 One name frequently cited as representing this cutting edge is Charles Taylor.Footnote 5 And yet at present no study systematically considers Taylor's interpretive theory to see how it fares against the most salient criticisms made of it. This paper seeks to rectify this situation, while also showing how Taylor's interpretivism helps bring empirical social science into closer proximity with normative political and ideological concerns.
As we shall see, Taylor's critics make two principal objections to his interpretivism (echoed in the literature that rejects the interpretive turn more generally). First, critics argue that Taylor's interpretivism is unable to offer explanations of social reality, thereby trapping the social sciences in descriptions of the self-understandings of agents. And second, critics charge that Taylor's interpretivism lacks criteria of objectivity, thereby making the social sciences relativistic. In what follows, I argue that both these criticisms rest on basic confusions. Not only is Taylor's interpretive theory explanatory, but it also has sophisticated modes of objective validation. I argue this by drawing on a novel, Heideggerian analysis of moods as the justification for Taylor's interpretivism. Moreover, I also explore two little-noticed ways in which Taylor's conceptions of explanation and objectivity have important political and normative ramifications. This paper is therefore a vindication of Taylor's hermeneutics. But given Taylor's importance as a standard bearer for interpretive theory, this battle serves as a proxy for a larger war. At stake in such debates is the very fate of an interpretive turn in the study of politics. But as we shall see, also at stake is the possibility of a more comprehensive political science, one that encompasses both empirical and critical features.
My argument is divided into three parts. In the first part I present the most powerful criticisms made of Taylor's interpretivism to date. In the second, I analyze the actual ontological basis for Taylor's interpretivism by relating it to Heidegger's conception of human agency. Specifically, I argue that Taylor employs a Heideggerian phenomenology of human moods in order to provide the justificatory force for the ontological claim that humans are self-interpreting animals. Finally, in the third part I show how Taylor's actual position (part 2) is not vulnerable to the criticisms made of it (part 1). Also in the third part, I conclude by showing how a defense of Taylor's interpretivism opens onto critical treatments of ideology and political practice, yielding a social science that is normative as much as it is empirical. These novel ways of bridging the normative and the empirical have not been developed at any length in the secondary literature, and in order to rectify this situation I draw briefly for illustrative purposes on Taylor's latest work in A Secular Age and Dilemmas and Connections.
The structure of my paper is relatively straightforward. But before beginning, a few prefatory remarks are necessary in order to situate my project within the already ample secondary literature on Taylor. First, as is probably already clear, my aim is not primarily historical. Rather, because I am treating Taylor as a key point of reference in wider debates over the interpretive turn, my approach is both pragmatic and synchronic. It is pragmatic in that my ultimate goal is to vindicate Taylor in the context of debates over the interpretive turn. My chief task, in other words, is to pragmatically use the resources of Taylor's philosophy in order to respond to critics of the interpretive turn. In this regard, I follow in the spirit of Richard Bernstein, whose keen commentary on Taylor has always been conducted with an eye toward our current situation in social and political theory.Footnote 6
But my approach is also synchronic in that I restrict myself to what Naomi Choi has identified as Taylor's mature “hermeneutic realism,” ignoring his earlier “empirical” critique of naturalism.Footnote 7 Choi has persuasively argued that Taylor's defense of an interpretive approach began as a critique of naturalism on empirical grounds.Footnote 8 Only later did he develop an ontological argument about the uniqueness of human nature as the basis for an interpretive approach to social science. Choi's contribution, in other words, has been to narrate the moving picture of Taylor's intellectual evolution. By contrast, I limit myself to exploring his mature position.
Finally, a number of scholars—most notably Ruth Abbey, Choi, and Nicholas Smith—have emphasized the centrality of Heidegger's ontological thesis for Taylor's mature views.Footnote 9 My contribution in this regard is to draw attention to the importance of a Heideggerian phenomenology of moods as a form of justification underlying Taylor's interpretivism. Although Taylor's ontological thesis is well known in the secondary literature, little attention has been paid to his creative appropriation of Heidegger's conception of moods. This phenomenology of moods has also been neglected by critics of the interpretive turn more generally. Yet one of the basic claims of this paper is that those who wish to do away with the interpretive turn in political science must refute precisely this line of argument.
In short, although I am in fundamental sympathy with Abbey, Choi, and Smith (and will do my best to note my heavy debts to them throughout), I nevertheless believe I expand and innovate upon their work. I do this not only by bringing attention to the phenomenology of moods, but also by elaborating on Taylor's conceptions of objective validation, while drawing on his latest published work. Moreover, my work, unlike theirs, is primarily addressed to critics of the interpretive turn at large. Engaging and rebutting critics of interpretivism is a perennial task because ongoing objections and misunderstandings must always be considered and assessed. In what follows I carry forth this dialectical task, operating under the belief that Taylor is a key resource for these debates today.
Critics of Taylor's Interpretivism
There is considerable convergence among the critics of the interpretive turn in political science on the one hand, and the critics of Taylor's interpretivism on the other. In particular, both groups claim that interpretive theory is simply too narrow a paradigm for social science because it can offer neither forms of explanation that challenge an agent's self-understanding nor standards of objectivity.Footnote 10 Let us look at each of these two criticisms in turn.
First is the claim that interpretive social science cannot offer explanations that challenge the self-understandings of those it studies. Critics as varied as Michael Martin, Terry Pinkard, Harold Kincaid, and Daniel Little have all argued that Taylor's interpretivism is stuck in the viewpoints of its subjects.Footnote 11 According to Martin this failing in Taylor is part of a wider failing of the interpretive tradition, which is marred by what he calls the “Verstehen” doctrine, or the view that all social scientific inquiry reaches its goal by “taking the subjective standpoint of the social actors.”Footnote 12 In making this the goal of social science, critics believe that Taylor and interpretivism essentially ban causal explanations in favor of descriptions of subjective viewpoints. As Little puts it, the “strict adherence to the interpretive dogma would seem to lead to a form of social analysis that is highly descriptive and not at all explanatory.”Footnote 13 And Pinkard echoes this sentiment writing that Taylor denies an “explanatory social science” and leaves us with a “purely descriptive hermeneutic.”Footnote 14
This line of criticism, if true, has an important consequence. Namely, once trapped in the interpretive paradigm, social science has no way to challenge or override agent self-understandings. Instead, interpretive social scientists must simply take agents' beliefs more or less at face value. This also means that ideology critique and the analysis of distorted beliefs are not given sanctuary in an interpretive social science. Rather, Taylor's interpretivism dead-ends in a barren descriptivism (i.e., a form of social science that is little more than the description of subjective viewpoints).
The charge of descriptivism brings us to a second major critique of Taylor that resonates with the wider debates over the interpretive turn. This is the claim that interpretivism is relativistic because it lacks standards of objectivity. For instance, Martin argues that in Taylor's hermeneutics “there is no objective way of validating interpretations of social phenomena.”Footnote 15 Likewise Pinkard claims that Taylor's hermeneutics present a “fairly straightforward relativism” that “outlaws rationality” in favor of the bare assertion of rival intuitions; while James Bohman observes that Taylor's position “disallow[s] any epistemic clarification of ‘correct’ interpretations or ‘true’ meanings.”Footnote 16 In short, social science under the wayward stewardship of Taylor's interpretive theory is deemed unfeasible because it suffers the twin defects of descriptivism and relativism.
Surely no one aware of these twin flaws would be attracted to such an impoverished vision of social science. But then the question becomes why Taylor believes the social sciences are interpretive in the first place. In answering this question we reach an even deeper level of critique leveled against Taylor. Many critics have rightly noted that Taylor's interpretivism rests on the basic philosophical assumption of antinaturalism, or the view that there is an essential difference between the forms of explanation appropriate to the natural versus the social sciences. But according to these critics, Taylor's antinaturalism is fundamentally contradictory.
Martin, for example, argues that Taylor's antinaturalism rests on the claim that all social science data is theory laden, and therefore not subject to the forms of explanation common to the natural sciences. In other words, Martin argues that Taylor's interpretivism is derived from the belief that social science data is somehow theory laden in a way that the data of the natural sciences is not. But, Martin notes, this would mean that Taylor's antinaturalism is invalid; for even if data is theory laden, this would apply equally to the natural sciences. Therefore, Taylor cannot conclude that the social sciences require different forms of explanation from the natural ones. Taylor has confused a valid thesis about the theory-laden nature of data in general, with an invalid claim about social science data in particular.Footnote 17
A similar criticism is offered by Kincaid, who argues that Taylor's antinaturalism rests on the belief that the social sciences require “contextual” interpretations while the natural sciences do not. But then the problem is that this does not present sufficient grounds for Taylor's antinaturalism, as “contextual factors play an important role in much good natural science.”Footnote 18 And Pinkard, too, takes much the same tack when he argues that Taylor's premises do not secure his conclusions, a fact made plain by someone like Quine who affirmed the theory-laden, contextual nature of all data without accepting Taylor's antinaturalist conclusions.Footnote 19
It is clear that, if true, the charges leveled against Taylor's interpretivism are devastating. For not only is his model of social science hopelessly descriptivist and relativistic, but it is also based on a faulty argument about the supposed difference between the natural and the social sciences. And if Taylor is indeed the standard bearer for the hermeneutic tradition today, this would spell disaster for the interpretive turn more widely. However, there is a problem with this entire line of critique. Namely, it is predicated on a long chain of misunderstandings and confusions.Footnote 20
In the next section, I will begin by debunking the claim that Taylor's antinaturalism is premised on a contradictory argument about the nature of social science data. Specifically, I will present a detailed analysis of the importance of Heidegger's conception of human agency as the actual basis for Taylor's antinaturalism. Once this detailed analysis is in place, I will then return to the claims that Taylor's interpretivism is descriptivist and relativistic. As part of rebutting these latter criticisms, I will also suggest that far from being too narrow, Taylor's interpretivism actually manages to encompass both empirical and normative features of the study of politics.
The Actual Grounds for Taylor's Interpretivism
There is a fundamental problem with the critics' interpretation of Taylor's antinaturalism. Namely, Taylor would agree that both the data of the natural sciences and those of the social sciences are holistic, theory laden, and held on antifoundational grounds.Footnote 21 Therefore, the distinction between the forms of explanation appropriate to the natural versus the social sciences cannot rest here. Rather, as rightly noted by Abbey and Smith, the true source of Taylor's antinaturalism is an ontological claim about human agency as uniquely “self-interpreting.”Footnote 22
Moreover, Abbey, Choi, and Smith have all stressed the importance of Heidegger to the ontological thesis that humans are self-interpreting animals.Footnote 23 In asserting the priority of this thesis I therefore clearly follow the precedent set by these thinkers. However, my own presentation is different in that I believe the justificatory force of Taylor's position can be better appreciated by seeing how it rests on a much less frequently noted Heideggerian phenomenology of moods. My basic claim in what follows is that Taylor justifies the thesis that humans are self-interpreting by formulating a Heidegger-inspired analysis of what he refers to as “the logic of our language of the emotions.”Footnote 24 Critics who wish to refute the interpretive turn (at least in terms defended by Taylor) need to somehow invalidate this account.
Abbey and Smith both note that Taylor follows Heidegger in “ontologizing” hermeneutics into the very structure of human action.Footnote 25 Prior to Heidegger, hermeneutics was concerned primarily with texts. But Heidegger advanced the view in Being and Time that humans are embodiments of self-interpreted meaning. Like an octopus's ability to change colors or the phases of a butterfly's life, self-understandings change and restructure the very way humans exist in the world. So Heidegger wrote that in the case of human beings “understanding constitutes this being.”Footnote 26 As I now hope to show, the basis for this claim in both Heidegger and Taylor is a phenomenological analysis of human moods. I will begin with a brief sketch of Heidegger's views before turning to Taylor's appropriation of them.
According to Heidegger, a primary way humans embody self-understanding is through what he called “attunement” or “moods.” Heidegger maintained that human beings are “always already in a mood” such that they “never master a mood by being free of a mood, but always through a counter mood” be it “elevated,” “a bad mood,” or even the apparent “smooth and pallid lack of mood.”Footnote 27 Moods, in other words, are an inescapable feature of all motivated human action. Moreover, according to Heidegger, these inescapable moods or motivational stances are not simply projections but rather disclose features of reality. Human moods, in other words, are forms of understanding: “Attunement always has its understanding. … Understanding is always attuned.”Footnote 28
Most famously, Heidegger argued that the mood he called Angst allowed individuals to realize the truth of their own mortality. More generally, Heidegger claimed that moods were “disclosive” of features of reality and made it possible that “things that matter to us can be encountered.”Footnote 29 Moods in this way have a cognitive dimension and are ways of knowing and accessing features of reality that otherwise remain inaccessible. In short, Heidegger's view of humans is that their way of being in the world is inescapably constituted by understanding in the form of various moods that cue them into different facets of reality. The latter, as I will now argue, is the true basis for Taylor's antinaturalism in the social sciences.
Taylor was clearly impressed by Heidegger's account of human agency. So he explicitly set out in “Self-Interpreting Animals” to vindicate the view of human life “adumbrated by Heidegger.”Footnote 30 But in doing so, Taylor also hoped to go beyond Heidegger, creating arguments capable of greater leverage in the debates over the human sciences. In order to accomplish this goal, Taylor began from Heidegger's premise that moods are an inescapable feature of human agency (though he substituted for Heidegger's “moods” the more common social science term “emotions”). Insofar as we are acting, or even deciding not to act, Taylor argues that we are being motivated by some emotion—for example, wonder, steadfastness, excitement, listlessness. Emotions thus comprise the “experienced motivation” of human action and behavior.Footnote 31 But in what sense are these moods not merely subjective projections but cognitive modes of understanding that grant access to certain features of reality? Taylor's argument here rests on a phenomenology of the logic of our emotional language. Specifically, he sets out distinctions between three classes of emotion. Together these distinctions are meant to establish an account of embodied human agency as essentially self-interpretive.
The first type of emotion distinguished by Taylor is what he calls “immediate feelings.”Footnote 32 Immediate feelings do not require language and are shared by animals and humans alike. An example of an immediate feeling is pain. Pain is immediate in that it requires no interpretation and is not contingent upon or mediated by judgment. If the dentist's drill slips onto a hapless patient's gums, the stimulus and response are direct. There is no way to be wrong or mistaken about pain in this sense. It is simply a direct response to stimulus. As Taylor puts it, “a situation is painful, just because we feel pain in it” such that “we cannot … feel pain mistakenly.”Footnote 33 For this reason we need not grapple with human self-understanding in order to account for this kind of pain. Likewise we have no trouble imagining what it is like for nonlinguistic animals—say, birds or polar bears—to feel such immediate sensations as pain.
A second type of emotion is also shared by humans and some animals. This kind of emotion requires the ability to judge the significance—or what Taylor calls the “import”—of a situation. An import, in Taylor's sense, is inseparable from an affective relationship to some feature of reality. So Taylor writes that imports are “affective modes of awareness” that cue us into a “property of something whereby it is a matter of non-indifference to a subject.”Footnote 34 Import emotions thus disclose the significance of certain features of reality in Heidegger's sense.
An example of an import emotion is fear. Fear requires the ability (whether linguistically or not) to grasp the significance of a situation as menacing or dangerous and therefore fear inducing. So, a herd of elk perceives the stalking pack of wolves and flees for safety. This is because the elk ascertain the significance of the wolves as menacing. Such perception depends upon judging a situation correctly and so can also be potentially mistaken. Thus, the same herd of elk might fear the forest ranger who is trying to administer medicine. Likewise, a lonely foreigner might fear the stranger come to help. The point is that judgment in these cases is inextricable from an affective mode. Fear is the mode through which the significance (e.g., menacing property) of the situation is normally ascertained.
Human subjectivity is partly comprised by the above two types of emotion. That is, we experience immediate sensations like pain as well as feelings that require judgments like fear. This much we share with nonlinguistic animals. Yet there is a third type of emotion that Taylor believes is peculiar to linguistic beings and key to the thesis of self-interpretation. What distinguishes this class of emotions is that they are strongly evaluative of what it means to be human.Footnote 35 Taylor lists shame, dignity, envy, remorse, and pride as a few examples of the many strongly evaluative emotions humans experience. What this wide range of emotions share is that they are all comprised of affective judgments about the significance of our “lives as subjects” and “as self-reflexive beings.”Footnote 36 Crucially, strongly evaluative emotions involve qualitative judgments of worth, of seeing some goals and states of affairs as higher than others. Thus, they capture the way humans experience not only immediate de facto or felt desires, but also desires about their desires. As Taylor puts it, unlike other animals, humans don't take “de facto desires as the ultimate justification” but move “beyond that to their worth.”Footnote 37 Smith has made the important observation that strong evaluation need not be consciously or reflectively carried out; that is to say, such evaluation might remain entirely implicit in an agent's actions and behavior.Footnote 38
Take the example of pride. Pride is an emotion defined by strong evaluation in that it consists of a judgment as to the worthiness of a particular state of affairs and how this reflects on one's sense of self. So, one man might feel pride in his ability to seduce women while another feels shame; likewise, one woman might take pride in her money while another in her ability to renounce worldly goods and serve the poor. As these brief examples suggest, strongly evaluative emotions judge not merely some feature of reality, but also the significance of one's own desires, actions, and identity as part of that reality.
Indeed, as Abbey and Smith have both rightly emphasized, Taylor believes strong evaluation is at the very heart of human agency insofar as it is what makes human identity possible.Footnote 39 In contrast to other animals, when we ask of a person “Who is that?” the full answer requires articulating “what is of crucial importance” to that individual, what are his or her desires about their own desires.Footnote 40 Questions of human identity are questions about the self-interpretations and strong evaluations that shape a life. For example, is she a nationalist? An anarchist? A vegetarian? Is he a Muslim? A “good old boy”? A Buddhist? Strongly evaluative emotions are expressive of the self-interpretations of human identity.Footnote 41 This is such that according to Taylor, in the case of humans, even emotions occurring in the first two classes tend to be colored by the interpretations that comprise our sense of identity. Thus, an emotion like fear or even pain might appear to us as cowardly or heroic, exulting or masochistic. And this means “human life is never without interpreted feeling; the interpretation is constitutive of the feeling.”Footnote 42
But with this last move Taylor does not intend to collapse the importance of the prior two distinctions in his account of the logic of our emotions. Rather, his basic point is that although human emotions are colored by our self-interpretations, we nevertheless recognize that some kinds of emotions can exist independently of language. Thus, immediate feelings (e.g., pain) as well as emotions that are not subject referring (e.g., fear) are both what Taylor calls “language independent,” and can be experienced by nonlinguistic animals.Footnote 43 This is in marked contrast to subject-referring emotions which absolutely require language and articulacy to be experienced. As Taylor puts it:
what we experience in the dentist's chair, or when the fingernail is rubbed along the blackboard, is in a sense quite independent of language … we feel that this pain is language-independent; and we have no trouble imagining an animal having this experience.Footnote 44
At the same time, human subjectivity is such that we incorporate even immediate emotions into our articulated, subject-referring senses of self. Thus, for example, human pain is typically perceived against some background sense of articulated emotion and identity.Footnote 45 There is no contradiction here. For Taylor's claim is that humans, as linguistic animals, can experience even their immediate feelings in light of further, subject-referring emotions. Thus, to return to our original point, even our immediate sensations can show up as colored by self-interpretation—as cowardly, proud, ashamed, exalted, self-defeated, and so on.
What are the upshots of this Heidegger-inspired phenomenology of human emotion for debates over interpretivism and the social sciences? One upshot is that it vindicates the ontological thesis that human agency (belief, action, and identity) is expressive of self-interpretation and as such constitutes a unique object of study. How this view of human agency requires an interpretive social science is brought out by two interrelated features that are corroborated, albeit via very different argumentative routes, by both Abbey and Smith.Footnote 46
First, as we have already seen, strong evaluation requires animals with linguistic capacities because it presupposes the ability to characterize a situation in relation to distinctions about what is worthy or unworthy for oneself. Thus, human emotional life is what might be termed language dependent, in that it typically exists through a process of self-articulation and self-expression. As Taylor puts it: “these feelings are articulated” even if only implicitly so.Footnote 47 And this means that human action is expressive of these self-interpretations.
This brings us to the second, essential point. Namely, the language dependency of human emotion and action gives our agency a unique ontological status. Rather than an independent relationship between object and description, in the case of strongly evaluative emotions we have a feature of our being in the world that is shaped by what Taylor calls redescription. In cases of redescription, “description and experience are bound together in [a] constitutive relation … [that] admits of causal influences in both directions” such that an “altered description of our motivation can be inseparable from a change in this motivation.”Footnote 48 So, I might reinterpret my resentment toward my brother as a form of repressed envy and then struggle to transform this into a nobler emotion such as admiration. Because such emotions are susceptible to redescription, the reality of emotion and experience can themselves be transformed through self-interpretation. This kind of redescription highlights a basic difference between the social and the natural sciences. As Taylor notes, the objects of the natural sciences like livers, DNA helix, or chemical compounds are not capable of transformation via self-interpretation.Footnote 49 Yet this is centrally true of human action, motivation, and self.
A major consequence of this for the social sciences is that explaining human action, motivation, and self requires, as a first step, grasping the self-interpretations, meanings, and language of the subject.Footnote 50 This is not true of objects of the natural sciences which are incapable of self-interpretation and redescription. The natural sciences no doubt involve interpretation, but the social sciences involve interpretations of interpretations.Footnote 51
But Taylor's Heidegger-inspired phenomenology not only furnishes a powerful justification of the ontological thesis underlying interpretivism. It also directly undermines two forms of reductive materialism that often encroach on explanations in the social sciences. These two forms of materialism are given a particularly pithy summary by Taylor in A Secular Age.Footnote 52 The first kind of materialism, Taylor notes, would do away with human-motivated action entirely, explaining everything in terms of material, efficient causation. Reductive neuroscience of a certain kind might qualify as an example of this attempt to reduce human behavior to material, efficient causes. The problem with this sort of approach, as we have seen, is that it misunderstands the language-dependent nature of human motives and actions. Grasping human actions requires interpreting the languages that inform them, and not simply diving down into a supposedly more absolute, nonlinguistic dimension of reality.
The second kind of materialism Taylor dubs “motivational materialism.” Unlike the first kind, motivational materialism allows for motivated human actions while only accepting “explanations on the lower motives, not moral aspirations … [or] strong evaluations.”Footnote 53 Here Taylor cites crude forms of Marxism as well as the massively influential behaviorism of B. F. Skinner as examples. But if Taylor's phenomenology of emotions is valid, then this second type of materialist explanation is also clearly mistaken. For as we saw, in the case of self-interpreting animals even lower human motives are colored by the moral language of strong evaluation. This means any attempt to reduce human action to the stimulus of language-independent emotions like fear, pain, hunger, sexual appetite, or other such nonsubject-referring emotions is fundamentally problematic. For while it may be a valid move in the study of nonlinguistic animals, it subtracts the central feature of motivated human action: namely, its strongly evaluative, subject-referring dimension.
In short, contra the critics, Taylor's interpretivism rests on a phenomenology of the logic of our emotions and not an argument about the theory-laden nature of data. Specifically, Taylor establishes the unique ontological status of human agency by following Heidegger in arguing that our emotion (and hence our agency) is always colored and structured by interpretation, such that man “cannot be understood simply as an object among objects, for his life incorporates an interpretation.”Footnote 54 Thus, in order to refute Taylor's interpretivism, critics would have to in some way invalidate this phenomenology of human moods/emotions. Failure to engage this phenomenological argument means that Taylor's claims for the uniqueness of human nature as an object of study remain unscathed. We will now see how Taylor's interpretive social science, built on this basic ontological premise, is also not vulnerable to critics' charges of descriptivism and relativism.
Responding to the Critics
Explanation and Ideology Critique
My exegesis of Taylor's position thus far implies that social scientists must begin with agents' self-understandings. This is because without first identifying self-understandings there is no way to grasp the actions in need of explaining. As Taylor puts it, “interpretive social science requires that we master the agent's self-description in order to identify our explananda.”Footnote 55
But grasping these self-understandings requires locating them within specific contexts—what Taylor, following Gadamer, dubs a “home culture.”Footnote 56 The need to contextualize actions within home cultures is not only for the obvious reason that understanding meanings requires knowledge of the languages and concepts in which they are expressed. It is also because the meanings informing human actions often remain at the level of the implicit or inarticulate, manifest in practices and institutions but not in actual speech. Placing agents' self-understandings in the context of a particular culture's practices, institutions, and intersubjective meanings is therefore necessary to render actions intelligible. Indeed, if social science ever managed to fully purge the contexts of self-understanding it would also “dissolve the field of human action into meaningless motion.”Footnote 57
This particular point has not only been made repeatedly by Taylor, but has also received extended and illuminating exegesis by Abbey and Smith.Footnote 58 And yet this requirement of hermeneutics also brings us back to one of the primary criticisms of Taylor made by Martin, Kincaid, Little, Pinkard, and others. Namely, these critics argue that because Taylor's interpretivism makes agent self-understandings essential, it also reduces social inquiry to insider views of individuals and their communities. It is in this way unable to rationally challenge or override these self-understandings and terminates in a stale descriptivism. As Martin puts it, Taylor's hermeneutics fail to see that “there might be aspects in all social sciences including political science that are beyond self-understanding in the sense that social actors are unaware of them.”Footnote 59
Such descriptivism would indeed make for an intolerably hobbled social science. Fortunately, it is not Taylor's position. In fact, he criticizes other interpretivists for this very descriptivism.Footnote 60 Instead, Taylor's hermeneutics occupies a middle ground between the extremes of a stale descriptivism of self-understandings and a crude positivism that neglects self-understandings altogether. The reason Taylor's critics fail to see this is because they draw an invalid inference. Namely, they assume that the requirement that all social science begin with self-understandings entails an inability to seriously challenge an agent's own explanations. But this confuses the language of the explananda with that of the explanantia. For although interpretivism implies that we must engage self-understandings in order to properly identify the explananda of social phenomena, “it by no means requires that we couch our explanantia in the same language.”Footnote 61 In other words, while the self-interpretation of agents is an essential component of what needs to be explained, the explanation itself need not support that self-interpretation.
In this regard, it is quite telling that Taylor himself rarely uses the term Verstehen and when he does it is explicitly to draw a contrast between “Verstehen” and something like Martin's doctrine, which he dismissively dubs an “incorrigibility thesis.”Footnote 62 In fact, as readers of Taylor like Abbey and Smith have argued, interpretivism involves no such commitment to the incorrigibility of the views of those studied.Footnote 63 To the contrary, according to Taylor, interpretive explanation by its very nature pushes beyond mere agent self-understandings. This is because explanation inescapably involves some judgment as to truth and validity. Specifically, our own assessment of what is real is essential to our understanding others and thereby to our explanation of their actions and motives. Taylor attributes this insight to Gadamer, who saw that a social inquirer's own assumptions about reality are necessarily evaluative of those he seeks to explain. As Taylor puts it: “There can't be explanation without a judgment of truth”; and therefore “one's own language of explanation” must confront that of “one's subjects' self-understanding.”Footnote 64 In other words, when we are trying to explain a man's actions in a way that he “would have found strange … we are ipso facto challenging his picture of things and putting our own in its place.”Footnote 65 In this way, all social and political explanation is inescapably evaluative. That is, it involves assessments as to the truth and reasonableness of given beliefs and actions.
Taylor illustrates this point with the vivid example of a man who is frantically waving his hands to fend off a swarm of flies. We might assume the explanation of this man's actions is obvious and terminates with his own self-understanding. But suppose we observed no flies swarming around the man's head and yet when we asked him why he was waving his hands, he replied: “Because of those damned flies!” Suddenly we would be pressed to seek a new explanation for the man's actions. According to Taylor, this example illustrates a basic feature of social scientific explanation. Namely, if an agent's self-understandings are found incompatible with our notion of what is real or valid we turn to explanations “in terms of illusion; and we identify something else to explain.”Footnote 66 By the same reasoning, if our notion of reality coincides with the self-understandings of those in question then our explanations will terminate with an ideal articulation of this self-understanding. This means the more seriously we take the validity of someone's beliefs and actions the more likely we are to accept them as explanatory on their own terms. It also follows that social and political explanation must involve (either implicitly or explicitly) some assessment in terms of rationality, illusion, reasonableness, ideology, and so on.
Interpretivism, therefore, doesn't mean social scientists must find an agent's views sensible or even sane. To the contrary, the interpretive social scientist is inescapably involved in the task of evaluating the explanation of such self-understandings. Interpreting self-understandings might even mean challenging an agent's own account by proposing some overriding cause of which he or she remains unaware. In other words, in Taylor's account, social and political scientists cannot avoid the normative task of ideology critique. This is because all explanation either implicitly or explicitly involves an evaluation as to the reasonableness of the agents in question.
That Taylor's interpretivism (far from being trapped in descriptivism) is capable of explanations and even ideology critique should have been obvious to any reader of Sources of the Self. For in this work Taylor turns the tables on mainstream social science, arguing that he can offer a better explanation of the existence of their very own research programs than they can. Although we do not have the space to go into the nuances of this immensely rich work here, in brief form Taylor's argument is that naturalist research programs are not best explained by scientific advances, but by a repressed ideological motive. As Taylor puts this, naturalism encourages us to espouse pseudoscientific theories that are “extremely implausible” and require a “very powerful metaphysical set of preconceptions” in order to “over-ride so much that is so intuitively obvious about human life.”Footnote 67 Rather than driven by a veritable science, Taylor argues such research programs are actually sustained by a moral movement that he traces back to the time of Descartes and Locke; this moral movement sees human life as striving toward an ideal of autonomous and disengaged mastery over self and nature.Footnote 68 In other words, Taylor's claim about modern social science is that we are in the territory of a man waving his hands frantically at flies that don't exist (the nonexistent or illusory element here being a naturalistic science of man).
Whether or not Taylor's narrative of the moral sources of modern social science is correct, our wider point should be clear: far from being stuck in self-understandings, Taylor believes successful interpretive explanations actually involve critically evaluating the reasonableness of the agents involved. Crucially, the critical overriding of agent self-understandings doesn't negate the essentially interpretive task of social science. Grasping self-understandings is an inescapable part of social explanation insofar as it is a necessary step in order to successfully identify what it is that needs explaining. (After all, the man waving his arms frantically might not be worried about flies at all but instead be trying to invent a new dance move.) The point being that we cannot even begin to challenge the meanings of an agent's actions until we have some sense of what they are doing in the context of their home culture.
If Taylor is right, it clearly follows that social science must be both interpretive and critical. More to the point, opponents of the interpretive turn cannot in good faith accuse it of descriptivism or try to limit it to “soaking and poking.” Indeed, far from being too narrow, Taylor's interpretive approach actually affords a more comprehensive role to social science research than mainstream political science currently does. For unlike the latter's lingering value neutrality, Taylor's interpretivism encompasses both the tasks of empirical investigation and ideology critique.
Objectivity and Political Practice
But the above line of argument does nothing yet to combat the claim that Taylor's interpretive theory is hopelessly relativistic. Pinkard, for example, accuses Taylor of a relativism in which “any interpretation is as valid as another” and there are “no rational guidelines” for adjudicating between rival interpretations.Footnote 69 Similarly, Martin declares that in Taylor “there is no objective way of validating interpretations” because “interpretations are ultimately based on rationally unsupported intuitions and value decisions.”Footnote 70
Yet the problem with this line of criticism is that it once again fails to grasp Taylor's actual position. For Taylor's claim is not that objectivity is impossible in the social sciences, but rather that because of the nature of the object (i.e., self-interpreting) validation cannot be settled by methods that do not take agent beliefs centrally into account. This is present in Taylor's formulation of an antifoundational account of objectivity, one inspired by another important interpretive theorist, Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre's primary insight, according to Taylor, was to see that we can still rationally assess rival theories even after we have accepted that it is no longer possible to appeal to an absolute criterion existing outside of all interpretations (e.g., brute or foundational data). Taylor's version of this insight is in terms of what he calls “transition arguments” or reasoning that informs transitions between two or more competing theories.Footnote 71
According to Taylor, transition arguments do not offer an absolute criterion or method of assessment. Instead, they make claims to comparative superiority. They evaluate between two theories X and Y in such a way that the “claim is not that Y is correct simpliciter but just that whatever is ‘ultimately true,’ Y is better than X.”Footnote 72 In this way, such appeals are a form of ad hominem argumentation, in that they are “specifically addressed to holders of [theory] X” and claim that “whatever else turns out to be true, you can improve your epistemic position by moving from X to Y.”Footnote 73 This means that transition arguments never establish absolute truth or validity; rather, as MacIntyre noted, they offer a best account so far in light of rival accounts.
Taylor identifies three types of transition arguments. In the first he follows MacIntyre's lead by appealing to anomalies/dilemmas. A theory Y may better account for rival theory X's self-recognized anomalies or dilemmas. In doing so, theory Y establishes itself in comparative terms as an epistemic gain over X, better able to deal with X's own difficulties and breakdowns. For example, Taylor's A Secular Age argues that traditional theories of secularization, which hold that religious practice is in inexorable decline, are unable to resolve certain dilemmas. For instance, they have difficulty explaining the contemporary mass mobilization of politicized religious identities, as well as the explosion of individualist spiritualities.Footnote 74 Much of Taylor's book is an attempt to give a better theory of what secularism in fact means in light of the anomalies plaguing traditional secularization theories. My point, of course, is not whether Taylor's view on secularism is correct, but rather to illustrate how objectivity might be established through comparing anomalies.
A second type of transition argument similarly forces a dilemma onto its rival. Only this time the dilemma is imposed from the outside by a theory's having some kind of success that cannot be matched by its rival. So theory Y may have success in developing some new technology or know-how, or else opening new lines of inquiry or understanding, such that theory X is unable to account for or match this advance. Taylor notes that the mediating factor here might be some implicit feature that both theories acknowledge as valuable or of worth.Footnote 75 For example, Taylor suggests that post-Galilean natural science's triumph over its Aristotelian predecessor was in part due to the technological mastery and know-how it facilitated that the old, Aristotelian science was completely unable to match.Footnote 76
A final type of transition argument has no parallel in MacIntyre and is of particular importance to social science because, as I will show, it links social science to the evaluation of political practice. Smith briefly but illuminatingly discusses this kind of transition argument as what he dubs “testing in practice.”Footnote 77 I will try to expand on his discussion here, drawing on Taylor's most recent work for illustrative purposes. This type of transition argument claims that theory Y might be shown to be an epistemological gain not through comparison to a rival theory but by direct appeal to a specific individual's lived experiences, intuitions, or sense of what is true. In this last case the shift to a new theory is presented as an “error-reducing move” in which one tries to offer someone “an interpretation of themselves which … if accepted, will bring about the self-justifying transition.”Footnote 78 Taylor notes that this form of argument is intensely ad hominem and common to biographical changes, as when we suddenly “see the light” and fall in love with someone, or else convert to a new political party or religious tradition.
At first blush this last type of transition argument perhaps appears the least relevant to social science hermeneutics. But in fact the opposite is true. In his 1983 essay “Social Theory as Practice,” Taylor showed how a special form of it is of unique importance to social science. In condensed form, Taylor's claim in this essay is that certain forms of personal transformation are hugely important to social and political science because “in politics … accepting a theory can itself transform what that theory bears on. … Theory in this domain transforms its own object.”Footnote 79 That social science is able to transform the very reality it seeks to explain is another way of returning to the thesis that human beings are self-interpreting. Typically, the objects of study in the natural sciences are unable to transform themselves through the phenomenon of redescription. Yet in the social sciences the very theories which seek to explain the world might infiltrate the self-understandings of the people in question, leading them to alter their identities, motives, and practices.Footnote 80 This is why, for example, the advent of Marxist economics and social science forever altered the course of modern politics, spawning parties, guerilla movements, and governments.
How does this bear on the above discussion about evaluating rival theories? Taylor's claim is that a further way of establishing the strength of rival social science theories is “to judge how practices fare when informed by the theory.”Footnote 81 Indeed, Taylor notes that in our ordinary political life it is quite common to evaluate social and political theories by assessing how they fare when informing practice. For instance, during the Cold War it was not uncommon to hear anticommunists like Leszek Kolakowski argue that the practical embodied consequences of Marxism were a Stalinist state, while radicals like Trotsky argued that the undistorted principles of Marxism had never been realized, owing to contingent and obstructing factors. Likewise, today one might debate the practical merits and demerits of the increasing influence of rational choice theory and preference-maximizing economics on a growing number of human practices.Footnote 82 The point being that in such cases a theory can be evaluated through practical validation: namely, whether the “practices informed by wrong theories will be in an important way self-defeating” or if instead our actions become “less haphazard and contradictory, less prone to produce what we did not want at all.”Footnote 83
Taylor's own work is again helpful in illuminating this feature of interpretive social science. So, for example, in A Secular Age Taylor argues that certain forms of twentieth-century communism have been tragically self-defeating because they were guided by flawed theories of what humans are in actual practice capable of becoming. In this vein, Taylor frequently cites Soviet Bolshevism, which began from the benevolent aspiration of transforming the human race, but later came to motivate systematic violence and misanthropy. As Taylor puts it:
The history of despotic socialism, i.e., twentieth-century communism, is replete with this tragic turn … [in which] a lofty humanism posits high standards of self-worth, and a magnificent goal to strive towards … but by this very token it encourages force, despotism, tutelage, ultimately contempt, and a certain ruthlessness in shaping refractory human material.Footnote 84
Taylor's argument here is meant to show how a certain theory of political and social life can in practice become self-defeating, as a form of heroic “philanthropy, in actual practice, can breed misanthropy.”Footnote 85
Another example of such argumentation (and one that is perhaps closer to the concerns of working political scientists today) appears in Taylor's recent work on nationalism in Dilemmas and Connections. Here Taylor contests a theory of nationalism that he claims shapes much of the politics of the modern world. This is the theory that each nation, as the cultural expression of a unique and sovereign people, is legitimately entitled to an independent political state. Taylor summarizes this theory of nationalism, which he claims has caused the world “bitter trouble,” by citing Ernest Gellner's formulation that it is the “political principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.”Footnote 86
Much of Taylor's recent thought on nationalism pushes back against this tendency to equate national identity with absolute political sovereignty. For instance, this is evident in the work he has done to distinguish nationalist sentiment from patriotic identification.Footnote 87 But what is of interest for our purposes is another way in which Taylor attacks this theory. Namely, he questions its feasibility not at the theoretical but rather at the practical level. In this vein, Taylor argues that the theory that national units should be made congruent with political units is utopian and self-defeating. It is utopian because “thousands of groups … can claim the status of ‘nation’” such that even “giving each its parcel of land would still leave each pocket handkerchief state with national minorities, so inextricably mixed are the world's peoples.”Footnote 88 But it is self-defeating because beginning from a claim about the dignity and right of every people to political independence, its “utopian scheme could only be carried through by massive ethnic cleansing” in order to purge those political units of further subgroups of sovereign peoples.Footnote 89 So, this conception of nationalism, which justifies the view that each nation has “monopoly control over ‘their’ territory … can only be applied by negating its own universalist ethical basis.”Footnote 90 In this way, Taylor assesses the validity of this theory of political sovereignty by appealing to practical considerations and debating how true the theory can become in practice.
Of course, the point is not whether Taylor is right or wrong about nationalism or the “tragic” turn in twentieth-century communism. Rather it is to illustrate how an interpretive social science involves a critical dialogue between social scientific theories and lived political practice. Put differently, Taylor's insight is that social science, far from being relativistic, is susceptible to objective evaluation according to how it fares within concrete political practice. Theories of social science can be assessed not only in terms of how true they are but also of how true they can become. So we might only be convinced of the objective validity of a theory Y once we put it into concrete political practice. Because humans are self-interpreting animals, social science is never a straightforward matter of description; it is also always a question of how true a theory can become in and through political practice.
But this means that—contra his critics—Taylor has developed an interpretive theory capable of various forms of objective validation. Far from a nonrational, relativistic appeal to intuitions, Taylor has instead articulated a robust rationale for evaluating rival interpretations that includes comparing anomalies, successes, and the ability of particular social theories to guide practice. This last form of objectivity in particular shows that Taylor's interpretivism is in no way too narrow. Instead, it actually frees social science to encompass both empirical research and the critical assessment of lived political practice. Thus, my defense of interpretivism has turned the tables on those who would criticize Taylor's interpretivism as too narrow a paradigm. Far from suffering the dilemmas imputed to it, Taylor's interpretivism actually starts to open novel connections that break down the long estrangement between empirical research and normative, critical work in the social sciences.
Conclusion
I have argued that Taylor's form of interpretive theory is not vulnerable to the most trenchant criticisms made of it so far. Far from being stuck describing self-understandings, it is actually inescapably evaluative and explanatory. Far from being relativistic, it is subject to forms of objective validation that help us reflect on the interactive relationship between social science theories and lived political practice. I must therefore conclude that it is not at present a defensible position to argue (as both Taylor's critics and mainstream political scientists often do) that interpretivism is only good for “soaking and poking” or descriptive understanding. Rather, such arguments reflect confusion as to the state of the art in hermeneutics. I must also conclude that far from being too narrow, interpretivism offers a paradigm that is in important respects more capacious than contemporary social and political science. In particular, Taylor's brand of interpretivism points the way to a social science that is both interpretive and critical.
Moreover, my essay has presented these arguments by drawing on a novel, Heidegger-inspired phenomenology of emotions. Such a phenomenology vindicates the basic ontological thesis of interpretive approaches, while also showing just how far critics of interpretivism are today from engaging with the key arguments. Finally, this leads us to consider afresh the ways in which Taylor's interpretive social science generates innovative forms of validation that allow for a study of social reality that is at once critical, practical, and politically engaged.
