12 Self-interpretation, attention, and language

Implications for economics of Charles Taylor’s hermeneutics1

Lawrence A.Berger

I can’t as yet ‘know myself’, as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters.

(Socrates, in Phaedrus, 230A)

Charles Taylor has been a major force in presenting hermeneutical thought to the Anglo-American community. The purpose of this chapter is to review relevant segments of Taylor’s (1985) two-volume work, Philosophical Papers (hereinafter referred to as Papers), and to explore the implications for economics. Two themes which run throughout Taylor’s work are: (1) man is a selfinterpreting animal; and (2) self-interpretation takes place within a linguistic background of distinctions of worth—a realm of qualitative contrast which is irreducible to the various formulae so popular in today’s social sciences. The main thesis presented herein is that the link between economics and hermeneutics lies in the notion of attention. It is argued that attention and language are intimately related, and that attention is to economics as language is to hermeneutics. Thus arises the intimate relationship between economics and hermeneutics.

SELF-INTERPRETING UTILITY FUNCTIONS

In a paper entitled ‘Self-interpreting animals’ (Papers 1/2), Taylor lays out the thesis which is central to hermeneutical thought. There is a realm of what are called ‘subject-referring emotions’ which lies at the heart of human motivation and action. These emotions are partly constituted by our self-understandings, and change as our articulations of them change. We are engaged in a life-long process of interpreting these feelings, and the very articulation shapes them and thus what we are. It is in this sense that we are self-interpreting animals; our interpretations of ourselves play an important role in our very constitution. Taylor argues that any social science which would purport to explain human activity cannot bypass this domain. It is not objectifiable, not amenable to the techniques of the natural sciences, for the articulations refer to emotions which are

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themselves constituted by articulations. This is the realm of subject-referring, experience-dependent properties which cannot be traced back to physical realities, such as underlying physiological states. We are in the realm of what it is to be human.

In ‘The concept of a person’ (Papers 1/4), Taylor contrasts the hermeneutical view of human agency with the atomistic perspective implicit in the mainstream of today’s social sciences. In the atomist view, which has its roots in the Enlightenment, people are characterized as conscious individuals who are completely transparent to themselves. They have the power to represent independent objects more or less accurately. This view is quite prominent in economics. The agent has a clear understanding of his preferences, which are represented by his utility function. The process of representing his feelings, his preferences for things and situations has no effect on this independent utility function. On the other hand, for Taylor, the crucial thing about agents is that things matter to them; things have a significance for them. The fact that we feel emotion means that we are moved by the significance of a particular state of affairs. The articulation of an emotion is our understanding of our particular situation and its ‘import’ for us. This self-understanding can be more or less correct; but the representation is not about an independent object, for the formulation is constitutive of the emotion.

In ‘Interpretation and the sciences of man’ (Papers II/1), Taylor argues that the human sciences cannot avoid the question of interpretation. There are no ‘brute data’ free from judgement in this realm. When studying human motivation and action, it is impossible to avoid the question of the meanings of situations to the agents involved in them. There is a hermeneutical circle of feelings, emotions, situations and actions, the meaning of which is always relative to other meanings. Any understanding of meaning must ultimately appeal to a field of social practices. These social practices in turn depend upon a language of mutual action and communication which makes the distinctions necessary for the practices. Social practices cannot be brute data, for they are ‘partly constituted by certain ways of talking about them’. One must understand the language, the underlying configuration of meanings, in order to understand the practices.

Practices are constituted by self-definitions of social agents, implicit in the underlying language, which involve visions of self and relation to others and society. These are ‘intersubjective meanings’, which are in the practices themselves, not in the minds of the agents. Practices are modes of mutual action and social relation, not aggregations of individual actions. Intersubjective meanings are the ‘common terms of reference’ which allow the convergence or divergence of beliefs.

Taylor also discusses what he calls ‘common meanings’, which are not just intersubjective but are ‘common reference points’—objects in the world that everybody shares. They are the basis of community, requiring a powerful net of intersubjective meanings. Reciprocally, powerful common meanings result in the formation of a greater web of intersubjective meanings as people live in

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community; and a strong sense sense of commun ity m eans ‘sponta cohesion’ between its members and less necessity to use force.

SOCIAL THEORY AS PRACTICE

A recent review (Hands 1987) of the implications of Taylor’s thought for economics saw Taylor as arguing in ‘Social theory as practice’ (Papers II/3) that economics can be successful by following the method of natural science. This was an unfortunate reading, for Taylor gives the example of inflation as a problem which has shaken economists’ faith in this regard, and which drags them unwillingly into the realm of self-understanding which he claims is unavoidable in social theorizing. Taylor does believe that there can be certain regularities of economic life which may be relatively resistant to changes in self-understanding. Winter (1986) has argued in a similar fashion that neoclassical techniques would appear to be appropriate in a very limited realm—in which agents are repeatedly exposed to a situation which varies little over time. Taylor does not say that economics as a whole is an exception, but rather that some economic theories would appear to be refutable if the promised results of their application were not forthcoming. He then writes:

And even these seemingly clear cases of verifiable theory may turn out to be muddy. Suppose the defenders of monetarism try to save it from the discredit of its failure as a policy by arguing that extraneous cultural or political factors—managerial practices, trade union rigidities—prevented its beneficent effects from ensuing. Won’t we have to follow the argument back into the domain where theories as self-definitions shape our practice?

(Taylor, Papers, II, p. 114)

As it is currently constituted, economic theory depends on a limited view of human motivation and action. Taylor argues that the apparent success of economics rest largely on the currently predominant cultural conditions which allow us to ‘be confident that in some department of their lives people will behave according to rather tightly calculable considerations of instrumental rationality’ (Papers, II, p. 103). Today’s societies do not form a timeless cultural matrix which would allow economics as currently constituted to aspire to the status of a universal, objective science. ‘Rather than being theories about how things always operate, they actually end up strengthening one way of acting over others’ (Papers, II, p. 103). A change in the self-understanding of society could result in a change in the culture, which in turn would mean that we could no longer depend so much on people behaving according to the regularities of instrumental reason.

In ‘Social theory as practice’, Taylor is concerned with how it is possible to validate theories in the social sciences. He begins by examining the relationship between theory and practice. In the natural sciences, we learn about underlying

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processes and adjust our practices accordingly. This has no apparent influence on the underlying mechanisms themselves. In the social sciences, however, the objects of study are themselves partly constituted by knowledge, and as such may change when theories are applied to them. For the practices are themselves the objects of study in social science, and cannot be separated from the everyday understandings—the selfdescriptions which constitute them.

In this paper, Taylor introduces a subject of profound importance for economic thought. He discusses the notion of ‘shared goods’ as an example of a theory which challenges our everyday (atomist) understanding. Falling under the category of the ‘common meanings’ discussed above, a shared good is by definition something that is sought after and cherished in common. This is to be differentiated from a ‘convergent good’, which may be an object of common interest, but could exist without such interest. Taylor gives the example of the law of the citizen republic as a shared good. Action takes its significance in relation to the laws. Since the key characteristic of the hermeneutical agent is that things matter, that she is moved by what is significant and meaningful, the fact that the significance is shared means that our way of acting together is qualitatively different. We can ‘become capable of acting together in a spontaneously self-disciplining way, the secret of the strength of the republics’ (Papers, II p. 96).

Taylor contrasts the theory of shared goods with the atomist approach underlying economic theory. Atomist theories predominate in the everyday understanding of western society, and thus the practices of interest to economic theory are informed by such theories. He gives the example of the common understanding of the political process, in which society is understood as the interaction of individual agents. There is no room here for a theory in which action also takes place in a context of shared goods. From the perspective of shared goods, atomist theories represent a degenerate case. A society informed by an atomist theory ‘would be a society so fragmented that it was capable of very little common action, and was constantly on the point of stasis or stalemate’ (Papers, II, p. 99). It is vital that social choice proceed under the right intentional description—policies must ‘be adopted as the right form of a common purpose, and not as the point of convergence of individual aims’ (Papers, II, p. 100).

It may be argued (Hands 1987) that economics is indeed cognizant of the interpretive dimension of human action, since it employs intentional explanations in its model building. But the question is whether the discipline employs the right kind of intentional explanation. Atomist theories go hand in hand with the objectivist assumptions of complete self-transparency in which desires, preferences and goals are clear and unproblematic. The only problem is achieving such aims in the face of ‘technological’ constraints. This is very different from the view of the agent implicit in the theory of shared goods. How is it possible to adjudicate between competing social theories such as atomism and shared goods?