By CHARLES TAYLOR*

Foreword of the lnewly edited book

1.

I am very pleased that this book, which was the basis of my doctoral thesis, will be republished in the series Routledge Classics.

In fact, this book was an intervention in an important debate that has been going on for a long time and may never reach a final consensus. It is the debate between those who believe that an adequate account of human life, evolution, and historical development can be given in the (atomistic and mechanistic) terms of post-Galilean natural science, and those who maintain that this attempt is fatally flawed.

This is a dispute between those who maintain that truly valid knowledge must take a “scientific” form, whose paradigms are found in the natural sciences, and those who believe that no adequate explanation of the human being can disregard or leave aside the goals and achievements we seek, and the self-understandings with which we struggle, none of which can find a place in a science built on these paradigms.

My thesis was (and continues to be) that purposes and self-understanding – in the terms of this work, teleology and intentionality – cannot be ignored in the sciences of human life, under penalty of sterility and, ultimately, failure.

The goal is to “reduce” complex culturally defined thoughts, feelings, and acts to explanations in terms of the acceptable building blocks of a materialistic science: motor stimuli and responses, when it comes to “behavior”; the operations of computer programs as the supposed basis of thought; DNA replication to trace the continuity through history of “selfish genes” and the like.

But it is in the nature of this debate that it is fought around different reductive projects. At first, exaggerated and sweeping claims are made for the new project: all animated actions will be explained by stimulus-response links built up by “habit,” all thought will be explained by self-correcting computer programs operating in the brain like a computer, all heredity by selfish genes. Much enthusiasm is generated by these fascinating prospects. But as time goes on, problems develop, difficulties recur, overly simple hypotheses fail, and doubts arise.

Eventually, a crisis point is reached at which the project is abandoned or at least shelved indefinitely. But for this movement to happen, there has to be an alternative on the horizon. For, in fact, these two philosophical perspectives (one could also say: temperaments – the reductive and the humanistic) are largely shared.

Reductionists cannot move away from a given program unless and until a replacement for it appears on the horizon. And indeed, what happened at some point in the 1960s was that the fashion for computers as models of the mind came into being, which set the stage for the wholesale abandonment of Hull-Skinner behaviorism, and younger scholars jumped on the bandwagon.

2.

The explanation of behavior was published in 1964, just at this critical turning point! Which might seem to put me in the shoes of the legendary rooster who couldn’t help but believe that his crowing made the sun rise. But of course I never thought so – well, not for a long time. (The real coup de grace for the old theory was delivered by Noam Chomsky in his famous review of B.F. Skinner’s book on language, Verbal behavior [Verbal behavior], after which behaviorism was reduced to tatters.)

The explanation of behavior It was my first book, but it is not a unique book, because the questions surrounding human science and the conditions for an adequate non-reductive explanation of human action have continued to preoccupy me throughout my life. These questions take different forms in different disciplinary contexts, but there is an obvious analogy between the debates in these different places.

My position on all this has been inspired from the beginning by the phenomenological tradition and, in particular, by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His influence is evident in The explanation of behavior. The model was established by The Structure of Behavior e Phenomenology perception, which unite philosophical and experimental discoveries to make their main points.

Later I found myself in the Department of Political Science, where questions about the nature and method of social science became unavoidable. And the analogies with the questions treated in The explanation of behavior were entirely obvious. It was not that anyone was proposing to borrow the theories of natural science and explain human action in terms of stimulus-response. But the idea was spreading that the explanation of political action had to invoke tangible concrete interests.

This was an approach often characterized as “materialist,” a term that played a central role in the Marxist variant, but the notion of “interest” often played a central role in the work of political scientists who were virulently anti-Marxist.

However, even where reductionism was far from crude, there was a general tendency to avoid attempts to explore in depth the different self-understandings of political actors or to examine in depth the different political cultures that operate in different countries today.

3.

What I call “political cultures” are shared understandings of a society’s accepted institutions and practices. I later coined the term “social imaginaries” to refer to these shared understandings. But the problem is that they are often under-theorized, or, in other words, not sufficiently articulated. Irving Goffman’s excellent work, for example, shows how much of what goes on in everyday exchanges is based on tacit understanding, which is nowhere clearly formulated.

The result is that probing the nature of these implicit understandings often requires trying to articulate them in terms that agents would not immediately recognize. Here, skills and practices are best displayed in the work of skilled ethnographers. But there is no guarantee that we will get things right. Indeed, we might even say that there is no such thing as getting things right once and for all, in the sense that no improvement could possibly be achieved.

Here we are dealing with what the phenomenological tradition calls “interpretation” or “hermeneutics,” and this is a practice capable of producing genuine insight genuine, but which can never claim to have reached a final version that is impossible to improve. One of the main stages of my thinking came with the writing of an article, five years after the publication of The explanation of behavior, Called Interpretation and the Sciences of Man [Interpretation and the Sciences of Man] (to which I would today give a gender-neutral title, but 1970 was still the ignorant age in which the need for it was not widely recognized).

Here the insights came to me from the phenomenological tradition, because it was thinkers from that lineage who developed the key ideas: Martin Heidegger, Hans-George Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur.

Why do I think the “hermeneutic turn” is so important? Because in its absence, social and political theorists are tempted to deal with artificial universals, processes from different societies grouped together under a single name, which are in fact very different, because even if the agents involved use the same vocabulary, or terms that are considered translations of each other, true self-understandings can be very different from one culture to another, and the generalizations we make can only cause astonishment by their incorrectness.

Two areas I have been involved in trying to show this are: “modernization” theory and (as a component of this) “secularization.”

At the end of the twentieth century, the fashion in comparative politics for a universal “modernization theory” was at its height. The movement in world history was towards economically developed, geographically and socially mobile, highly urbanized, “secular” societies (to name just a few of the main features), and since these societies historically belonged to different civilizations, this represented a convergence towards a much greater similarity. “Modernization” was the name of the process that caused (or is causing) this, and it happens in different civilizations at different times, but it brings about the same result, and as a process it is very similar everywhere.

But when one looks more closely at the real “developing” and “developed” societies that make up our world, it becomes clear that important differences have persisted, along with the convergences mentioned above. Indeed, the very notion of “development,” which underlies the crucial classification just invoked, could also blind us to important differences.

What was needed was the recognition of “alternative modernities,” an idea developed by the Center for Transcultural Studies, with which I have been working for 35 years. (And a group around the fruitful work of Shmuel Eisenstadt developed a similar conception of Multiple Modernities).

As for the second concept mentioned, “secularization,” one could argue that a similar unfounded homogenization has been imposed here by Western social science. This has often been thought to be a single process, happening at a different pace and occurring in different countries at different times, but fundamentally the same. The result has been a very Western-centric picture: we Westerners were the pioneers, and others followed later, sometimes reluctantly, in our wake.

It seemed to me obvious that although there were analogies between religious (or anti-religious) developments in different civilizations, the terms in which they were carried out and the dynamics involved were quite different. The way to proceed would be to attempt a study of secularization in one civilization (and perhaps even that would be too broad, because there were also important differences in any major civilization), and then to contrast that picture with what went on elsewhere and build up a more general picture from a combination of these more limited studies.

4.

This was the idea that precipitated me in writing A secular era, which deliberately focused on what happened in Western society, more precisely in (some of) the societies that emerged from the Latin Christianity of the Middle Ages. This was an exercise in hermeneutics and has all the vulnerability of that branch of knowledge. In accordance with what I said above about hermeneutics, it does not claim to be definitive. On the contrary, I know that there is much more to say and that the picture will be greatly altered by these new contributions.

My most recent book, The animal language [The Language Animal] explores another facet of the same set of questions. Reductionist theories of human life and development have always seen language as essentially important because of its function in encoding, recording, and communicating information. The early modern pioneers of language theory who preceded, overlapped, and contributed to the Enlightenment—Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac—were very focused on how language contributed to—indeed enabled—the development of science. And this focus persists in the heirs of this tradition, which can be found in the post-Fregean lineages of contemporary analytic philosophy.

I do not wish to dispute the importance of this function of language and the way in which it has developed and been refined by logic and philosophy. But language has other crucial roles in human life, which have been explored in an alternative tradition of philosophy stemming from German Romanticism, and in which the important figures are Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt (and, in the twentieth century, Heidegger). Language is crucial to human intimacy; we foster intimacy and also maintain distance in the way we speak to one another.

But on a broader social level, the language we use also creates or underlines hierarchies. Let us recall that in many languages, language is based on the distinction between intimate and formal treatment (the distinction tu/you ou du/you).

Not to mention the role of literature and art; nor the importance of narrative for our understanding of ourselves.

There are vast fields here to explore that need to be integrated into our theory of language and, consequently, into our understanding of ourselves as “language-bearing animals,” Aristotle’s definition of the human.

This description of my writings makes me sound like a monomaniac. And perhaps there is some truth in it. But in any case, it must be made clear that The explanation of behavior started me on a path that took me to many destinations that I had little idea of ​​at the time, but in retrospect form a single itinerary through many different places. I am very pleased that the book is now available again, for which I am grateful to Routledge.

My work has been mainly in what we call the “human sciences,” which we might roughly characterize as those disciplines in which culture, and particularly cultural differences, play an obvious role: political history, social theory, religion, linguistics, and the like. But a central area in which the dispute between the two contrasting perspectives has been discussed at length is in the biological or life sciences. This is certainly the area in which the reductionist position may seem most plausible.

As I don't feel competent to intervene here, I was greatly inspired by the work of Evan Thompson, Denis Noble and Lenny Moss.

But once the reductionist presumption is eliminated, the way is opened to a hermeneutical explanation of human cultures, and it is here that important discoveries still need to be made.

*Charles Taylor is professor emeritus of philosophy and political science at McGill University (Canada). Author, among other books, of The Sources of the “Self”: The Construction of Modern Identity (Loyola).

Reference

Charles Taylor. The explanation of behavior. Translation: Luiz Antonio Oliveira de Araújo. New York, New York, 2024, 392 pages. [https://amzn.to/3QCkRsQ]

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