Charles Taylor

Introduction

Charles Margrave Taylor (born 5 November 1931) is a Canadian philosopher, not a psychologist. That distinction needs to be made at the outset, because his name circulates widely in psychology without his ever having trained as one, conducted an experiment, or held an appointment in a psychology department. His relevance to the field is philosophical: he has spent a career arguing that the natural-science model of human behaviour cannot account for what human beings are, and that argument has been taken up by psychologists dissatisfied with behaviourism and with cognitive science.

Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Political Science at McGill University, where he spent most of his career. He is best known for Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), for his essay "The Politics of Recognition" (1992), and for A Secular Age (2007). Within psychology his influence runs through three channels: an early and systematic critique of behaviourism, an anti-naturalist account of the person as a "self-interpreting animal," and a hermeneutic conception of social inquiry that has been used to justify interpretive and qualitative methods. His first book, The Explanation of Behaviour (1964), was a direct assault on the research programme of B. F. Skinner.

Early Life and Education

Taylor was born in Montreal to a bilingual household: his father, Walter Margrave Taylor, was an Anglophone Protestant businessman originally from Toronto, and his mother, Simone Marguerite Beaubien, was a Francophone Roman Catholic. He was raised bilingual, an upbringing that later supplied him with concrete stakes in questions about language, identity and cultural survival rather than abstract interest in them.

He attended Selwyn House School from 1939 to 1946 and Trinity College School from 1946 to 1949, then took a BA in history at McGill University, graduating in 1952. As a Rhodes Scholar he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first-class BA in philosophy, politics and economics in 1955, and remained for doctoral work. His DPhil was awarded in 1961 for a thesis on explanation in the social sciences, supervised by Isaiah Berlin; it was published in 1964 as The Explanation of Behaviour.

Taylor has described his Oxford years as a time of disillusionment with the analytic philosophy then dominant there. He turned instead to the continental traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics, reading Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. That turn set the shape of everything that followed. He was also politically active as a student, becoming the first president of the Oxford Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Academic and Professional Career

Taylor returned to Canada in 1961 as an assistant professor of political science at McGill, moving to philosophy at the Université de Montréal in 1962 before settling back at McGill, where he became a professor of political science in the early 1970s. His 1975 study Hegel was a landmark in English-language Hegel scholarship and reframed Hegel as a thinker whose central concerns were those of modernity rather than of a closed metaphysical system.

From 1976 to 1981 he held the Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory at Oxford and a fellowship of All Souls College, then returned to McGill in time to take part in the 1980 Quebec referendum on sovereignty, campaigning for the federalist side. He became Professor Emeritus at McGill and, from 2002, held a chair as Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University. Alongside his academic work he has been continuously engaged in Quebec and Canadian public life, running as a New Democratic Party candidate in four federal elections in the 1960s, most famously losing the Mount Royal riding in 1965 to Pierre Trudeau, and serving on the Conseil de la langue française.

In 2007 he and the historian Gérard Bouchard were appointed to head the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, a public inquiry into reasonable accommodation of cultural and religious difference in Quebec. The commission's report made Taylor's ideas about recognition the subject of national argument rather than academic debate. His later books include Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), A Secular Age (2007), The Language Animal (2016) and Reconstructing Democracy (2020).

Major Contributions to Psychology

The critique of naturalism and behaviourism

Taylor's first book, The Explanation of Behaviour, attacked the claim that psychology should model itself on the natural sciences. Against the behaviourist programme he argued that human action is not merely behaviour plus a causal history, but is constituted by the meanings the agent attaches to it: the same bodily movement is a different action depending on what it is for. Psychology, on this view, needs concepts such as purpose, meaning and rule-following that cannot be reduced to stimulus and response.

He pressed the same point against the cognitive psychology that displaced behaviourism. In the essay "The Significance of Significance: The Case for Cognitive Psychology" he argued that replacing stimulus-response mechanisms with internal computational ones does not solve the problem, because it still treats the organism as a device processing inputs rather than as a subject for whom things matter. The critique has been taken up by a long line of psychologists and philosophers who hold that mind cannot be studied apart from meaning.

The self-interpreting animal and strong evaluation

Taylor's positive alternative turns on the slogan that human beings are "self-interpreting animals." Our emotions, desires and identities are partly constituted by the descriptions we give of them, and those descriptions are acquired within a language and a culture. Because a person's identity is formed through what Taylor calls webs of interlocution, it is never a private construction; it is a "situated self."

Closely tied to this is the notion of strong evaluation. Human agents do not simply weigh desires against one another; they judge some desires as higher, nobler or more worthless than others, and those judgements appeal to frameworks of value that are not themselves chosen. Taylor argues that modern moral culture has largely forgotten how to talk about these frameworks, and that the ideal of authenticity has consequently degraded into a shallow subjectivism. The resulting picture of the person has been influential in narrative and hermeneutic psychology, and in critiques of purely quantitative self-report measures.

The politics of recognition

In "The Politics of Recognition" Taylor argues that identity is partly formed by the recognition or non-recognition of others, so that misrecognition is not merely a lack of respect but a form of oppression that damages the self. He distinguishes the politics of equal dignity from a politics of difference and argues that modern democratic societies must combine both. Because social psychologists had independently demonstrated the damage done by stereotyping and by being treated as invisible, the essay has been widely used in the psychology of intergroup relations and in multicultural research.

Major Publications

The Explanation of Behaviour (1964)
Hegel (1975)
Hegel and Modern Society (1979)
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)
The Ethics of Authenticity, published in Britain as The Malaise of Modernity (1991)
Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (1994)
Modern Social Imaginaries (2004)
A Secular Age (2007)
The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (2016)

Impact and Legacy

Taylor's work has been honoured with the Hegel Prize (1997), the Prix Léon-Gérin (1992), appointment as a Companion of the Order of Canada (1995) and Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec (2000), the Templeton Prize (2007), the Kyoto Prize in arts and philosophy (2008), the John W. Kluge Prize, shared with Jürgen Habermas (2015), and the inaugural Berggruen Prize (2016). His ideas about recognition shaped the later work of Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, and his account of secularisation has reoriented the sociology of religion.

The criticism has been equally substantial. Liberal theorists, including Will Kymlicka and Amy Gutmann, have argued that the communitarian emphasis on cultural belonging risks licensing illiberal practices within groups and subordinates individual autonomy to collective identity. The feminist philosopher Susan Moller Okin pressed a sharper version of the objection in asking whether multiculturalism is bad for women: if a group's culture is what must be recognised, then the internal gender hierarchies that culture sustains are protected rather than challenged. Fraser, in her essay "From Redistribution to Recognition?," argued that the turn to recognition has displaced questions of economic redistribution, and that the two need to be held together rather than one substituted for the other.

Taylor has replied on several of these points. He has repeatedly rejected the communitarian label and describes his position as holistic individualism. In "The Politics of Recognition" he insists that the claim is not that every culture has equal value in every respect; it is that it is reasonable to presume, as a starting hypothesis open to rebuttal by further study, that a culture has something of value to contribute. The presumption, in his formulation, is explicitly defeasible.

A Secular Age has drawn historians' fire. Jon Butler, in "Disquieted History in A Secular Age," argued that Taylor focuses almost entirely on Western and wealthy societies and neglects the rapid growth of religion in Africa, Latin America and the Arab world, and that his account of the Reformation flattens the differences between Lutheran, Calvinist and Anabaptist movements while ignoring unbelievers and heretics of the period. Jonathan Sheehan, in "When Was Disenchantment?," made a related charge: that Taylor constructs a usable, partly mythologised past to serve a philosophical argument. The anthropologist Talal Asad has questioned the framing of secularity as a uniquely Western formation. Commentators on his earlier work have also argued that he never fully resolves the tension between moral pluralism and relativism, nor the tension between his historicist and his ontological accounts of selfhood. Taylor himself has conceded limits: discussing his theistic commitments he writes that he is "far from having proof."

These disputes have not settled, and that is the measure of the work. Taylor remains read in psychology less because he answered questions than because he supplied a vocabulary for doubting that the questions had been well posed.

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References

Taylor, C. (1964). The explanation of behaviour. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Taylor, C. (1975). Hegel. Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, C. (1985). Philosophy and the human sciences: Philosophical papers 2. Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1991). The ethics of authenticity. Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1992). Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition. Princeton University Press.
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Duke University Press.
Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (2016). The language animal: The full shape of human linguistic capacity. Harvard University Press.
Fraser, N. (1995). Recognition or redistribution? A critical reading of Charles Taylor's politics of recognition. New Left Review, 212.
Okin, S. M. (1999). Is multiculturalism bad for women? In J. Cohen, M. Howard, & M. C. Nussbaum (Eds.), Is multiculturalism bad for women? (pp. 7-18). Princeton University Press.