Charles Taylor on overcoming incommensurability

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 26, Issue 5, 2000, Pages 47-61

  Levy, Neil ^a  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

Charles Taylor; incommensurability; practical reason; relativism

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992818962     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600503     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 147–8.
2. On the strengths and weaknesses of the argument against incommensurability from the causal theory of reference, see Howard Sankey, Rationality, Relativism and Incommensurability (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1997), especially Chapters 3 and 4.
3. Charles Taylor, ‘Explanation and Practical Reason’, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 36.
4. Charles Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 36.
5. ‘Charles Taylor Replies’, in James Tully (ed.) Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 220.
6. Charles Taylor, ‘Responsibility for Self’, in Gary Watson (ed.) Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 123.
7. Charles Taylor, ‘The Importance of Herder’, in his Philosophical Arguments, p. 295, n. 9.
8. In his ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, in Bryan R. Wilson (ed.) Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
9. Charles Taylor, ‘Rationality’, in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences, p. 145; the page numbers given in parentheses refer to this source.
10. In his Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer explains the demand for the public provision of medical services in the Western world via a similar argument. Prior to the achievement of a significant degree of efficacy by medical intervention, public provision was demanded for the care of souls, and not the care of bodies. Today the situation is reversed, due to our loss of confidence in the former, and the increased efficacy of the latter. As Walzer puts it, disease itself, ‘even when it is endemic rather than epidemic, has come to be seen as a plague. And since the plague can be dealt with, it must be dealt with. People will no longer endure what they no longer believe they have to endure.’ See his Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 88.
11. See his ‘A World Consensus on Human Rights?’, Dissent (Summer 1996, pp. 15–21).
12. There may, in fact, be another and more fundamental flaw in Taylor's argument. Taylor argues that once a culture realizes that some degree of technological control over disease is in fact possible, it is irrational for it to reject the means of gaining such control. Azande witchcraft is therefore rational, so long as Western medicine is unknown to them, but ceases to be once they are aware of it. Notice, however, that this argument implies that Jehovah's Witnesses, who reject some of the benefits of Western medicine, are, to that extent, irrational. But, precisely because they are well aware of the power of Western medicine, and nevertheless still choose to reject it, their actions might be peculiarly well suited to expressing their sense of their relation to God. As Winch himself says, prayers can serve the function of expressing a complete dependency on God only if they are not viewed as a means of influencing the outcome (‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, p. 104).
13. Taylor, ‘Explanation and Practical Reason’, p. 43.
14. This idea of legitimation by narrative is closely parallel to Alasdair MacIntyre's suggestion that choice between two incommensurable paradigms can be rational when one of them is undergoing an ‘epistemological crisis’ that the other has the resources to solve. MacIntyre's position is in certain respects closer to Taylor's first argument, in that it hopes to establish a kind of superiority that both traditions can accept. This is the case because an epistemological crisis occurs when a tradition, by its own standards and not those of a rival, falls into incoherence. See Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 121–2.
15. Taylor, ‘Explanation and Practical Reason’, p. 53.
16. Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences, p. 53.
17. MacIntyre seems to suggest that understanding has such non-rational conditions, in his insistence that truly to understand a tradition, one has to apprentice oneself to a master of it, prior to being in possession of the requisite understanding which would make such an apprenticeship rational. Thus, ‘rationally unjustified belief has to precede understanding [and therefore] belief has to depend on authority’ (Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 91).
18. On this point see Hartmut Rosa, ‘Goods and Life-forms: Relativism in Charles Taylor's Political Philosophy’, Radical Philosophy 71 (May/June 1995): 24.
19. Charles Taylor, ‘Comparison, History, Truth’, in his Philosophical Arguments, p. 160.
20. Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 133.
21. Richard Rorty has independently proposed something very like the uni-directionality of transitions as a criterion to demonstrate the superiority of some cultural practices over others: ‘The pragmatist's justification of toleration, free inquiry, and the quest for undistorted communication can only take the form of a comparison between societies which exemplify these habits and those which do not, leading up to the suggestion that nobody who has experienced both would prefer the latter.’ See his ‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’, in Michael Krausz (ed.) Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), p. 43.
22. Taylor, ‘Comparison, History, Truth’, p. 163.
23. Taylor, ‘Rationality’, p. 149.
24. Taylor, ‘Charles Taylor Replies’, p. 214.