Human Agency and Language, by Charles Taylor

This essay is my attempt to lay down in plain terms the expressivist position advanced by Charles Taylor as an alternative to the dominant approach to the study of man, based upon an influential shift in philosophers’ understanding of language. Taylor adopts a view of man as the language animal, an animal whose very conscious experience is constituted by its capacity for speech and expression. This position reveals faults with the dominant approach, and leads to a holistic conception of language and meaning. Subsequent progression down this path leads to intriguing accounts of human nature and the source of our ancient notion of God.

The Failure of the Dominant Approach

In extracting Taylor’s argument for expressivism, it will serve us well to begin with a discussion of his critique of modernity. Taylor is critical of several mainstream disciplines, including the natural sciences, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. He takes issue not with these disciplines themselves, but rather with a conceptual scheme which underlies the dominant approaches in these fields, and consequently their objectives.

Taylor’s discontent is directed toward one influential attempt to resolve the old problem of meaning in the philosophy of language, a problem which has fuelled debate for centuries. This is what Taylor calls the ‘designative’ theory of meaning, the view that meaning consists in the role of individual words and sentences as designators for objects, relations, ideas and so forth in the world. This position represents a shift in our world-view, a shift which Taylor feels has done wonders to advance science, but which ultimately has moved us away from any plausible account of human nature...

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...ter what Taylor calls the ‘radically anti-subjectivist’ side of the expressivist doctrine. We encounter the claim that the community is, in a fundamental sense, the subject of expression. What expresses, the self or the subject of expression, is not some abstracted entity that experiences the world, but rather one aspect of a greater and ongoing expressive activity which constitutes the world. The subject of expression can have no true individuality, for it is only as an aspect of the greater expressive community that it can enjoy this world at all. The source of the notion of God comes strikingly to light here, in that we are but reflections of the language in which we live, and to which we at every moment both give rise and give ourselves over.

Work Cited

Taylor, Charles. Human Agency and Language, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.