Charles Taylor on Constitutive Theory of Language and Self-Interpreting Animals

This article examines Charles Taylor’s distinction between the natural and social sciences, his critiques of behaviorist and positivist methods, and his arguments for hermeneutic methods. For Taylor, our emotions involve strong evaluation and subject-referring imports that cannot be quantified, but through articulation. Since we are self-interpretative animals, our expressions of emotions may change how we understand and feel about ourselves. Therefore, we must understand human beings through the hermeneutical approach. I also show that Taylor’s hermeneutic approach is based on his constitutive theory of language, which emphasizes that the function of language involves expression, dialogue, and the composition of metabiological meaning, rather than just the designation of things. Furthermore, I argue that Taylor’s philosophy is a kind of hermeneutical realism and show how his principles of Best Account principle can respond to criticisms about leading to subjective outcomes and relativism. Finally, I clarify and defend the robust realism of Taylor’s pluralism from the critiques of Demmerling and Rorty by exploring Dreyfus’s and Taylor’s ontology of embodied coping.