Stephen Shennan - - In Andrew Gardner ed. Identifying and Defining Agency in a Political Context. Agency in Archaeology.
Robb eds. Justin Morris - - In Andrew Gardner ed. Group Agency and Individualism. Carole Rovane - - Erkenntnis 79 S9 Agency, Structure and Archaeological Practice. Self-Interpreting Animals. Charles Taylor - - Philosophical Papers 1.
Brad Gravina - - In Andrew Gardner ed. Added to PP index Total views 11 , of 2,, Recent downloads 6 months 1 , of 2,, How can I increase my downloads? Sign in to use this feature. About us. Editorial team. This article has no associated abstract. No keywords specified fix it. Find it on Amazon. Applied ethics. History of Western Philosophy. Normative ethics. Speculation here is ragged and confused, the symptom of a big intellectual puzzle. By contrast, the reductive view of agency is subscribed to with serene confidence.
What is crucial about agents is that things matter to them. We thus cannot simply identify agents by a performance criterion, nor assimilate animals to machines. There is, of course, a sense in which we can attribute purposes to a machine, and thus apply action terms to it. We say of a computing machine that it is, for example, calculating the payroll. But that is because it plays this purpose in our lives. It was designed by us, and is being used by us to do this. Outside of this designers or users context, the attribution could not be made.
What identifies the action is what I want to call here a derivative purpose. The purpose is, in other words, userrelative. If tomorrow someone else makes it run through exactly the same programme, but with the goal of calculating pi to the nth place, then that will be what the machine is doing. By contrast, animals and human beings are subjects of original purpose. Nor is it a derivative fact about me that I am trying to explain two doctrines of the person. Now one of the crucial issues dividing the first and second concepts of the person is what to make of this difference between original and derived purpose.
If you take it seriously, then you can no longer accept a perform- ance criterion for agency, because some agents performances can be matched derivatively on machines. For the first view, the difference has to be relegated to the status of mere appearance. Some things animals,ourselves look to us to have purposes in a stronger, more original sense than mere machines. And it offers therefore a different answer to the question, what makes a respondent?
This is no longer seen in terms of consciousness, but rather in terms of mattering itself. An agent can be a respondent, because things matter to it in an original way. What it responds out of is the original significance of things for it. But then we have a very different conception from the first. The answers to the two questions are related in a very different way. The basic condi- tion for being a respondent, that one have an original point of view, is something all agents fulfil. Something else needs to be said in answer to the question, what distinguishes persons from other agents?
And the answer to neither question can be given just in terms of a notion of consciousness as the power to frame representations. Consciousness in the characteristically human form can be seen as what we attain when we come to formulate the significance of things for us. We then have an articulate view of our self and world.
But things matter to us prior to this formulation. So original purpose can not be confused with consciousness. Nor does the notion of consciousness as representation help to under- stand the difference between persons and animals, for two related reasons which it is worth exploring at some length. The first is that built into the notion of representation in this view is the idea that representations are of independent objects.
I frame a rep- resentation of something which is there independently of my depicting it, and which stands as a standard for this depiction. This variant rejects egalitarianism within the affirmation of ordinary life, as well as benevolence, universalism and order.
Instead, some of its proponents see the affirmation of life as asking for the affirmation of power and destruction, while others are very much fascinated by death and violence. What they all share, Taylor says, is a fourfold bias. The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, ed. Schear London: Routledge, , Second, what we know can always be analyzed into clearly defined and explicit elements.
Third, when it comes to justifying our thought, we cannot go beyond those explicit and formulated elements. What underlies this approach is a notion of the material world as being devoid of teleology, of meaning, as a mechanistic realm of purely efficient causation on raw material.
The attempt is to articulate the framework or contact within which our explicit depictions of reality make sense, and to show how this is inseparable from our activity as the kind of embodied, social, and cultural beings we are. The contact here is not achieved at the level of Ideas [sic], but is rather something primordial, something we never escape.
It is the contact of living, acting beings whose life form involves acting in and on a world which also acts on them… This original contact provides the sense-making context for all other knowledge constructions, which, however, based on mediated depictions, rely for their meaning on this primordial and indissoluble involvement in the surrounding reality.
On the contrary, I think we can marshal arguments to induce each other to modify their judgments and what is closely connected to widen their sympathies. But this task is very difficult, and what is more important, it is never complete. Hermeneutical Nature of the Social Sciences a The Taylorean view of the social sciences as hermeneutical in nature is a logical consequence of the philosophical insights I have explained so far.
Given the fact that human self-understandings vary in time, Taylor would affirm that social theories should change accordingly. Knowledge thus construed, according to this view, consists of data that cannot be challenged or undermined by further reasoning. Inferences based on brute data are subject to logical and mathematical standards.
There is a quite legitimate notion of meaning which we use when we speak of the meaning of a situation for an agent. And that this concept has a place is integral to our ordinary consciousness and hence speech about or actions. Our actions are ordinarily characterized by the purpose sought and explained by desires, feelings, emotions. But the language by which we describe our goals, feelings, desires is also a definition of the meaning things have for us. Moreover, our understanding of these terms moves inescapably in a hermeneutical circle.
Thirdly, the whole is interpreted as well when we give an explanation of our actions. Even more, any proposed explanation within their realm supposes a shared understanding by scientists of the language concerned. However, this does not guarantee that any colleague would agree with such proposed explanation. In order to deal with this, one could try to provide him with supplementary explanations, which would unavoidably constitute further interpretations, or one might try to awake in our interlocutor the same intuitions that had informed our explanation.
It is clear, for what has been said, that what is not possible is to study human agency as if it were brute data, since the circularity of interpretation is unavoidable.
First, ask if the scientific hermeneutic account is superior, in terms of a more complete or profound explanation, than the pre-theoretical self-understanding of the agent. Third, ask if a proposed scientific account, when inspiring the practice of the agents, leads to a fuller or more authentic realization of the good that defines them.
This approach by Taylor would be particularly challenging for quantitative studies in the social and behavioral sciences. However, as one may deduce from his praise of the works of sociologists who do conduct that kind of studies such as David Martin, Jose Casanova and Hans Joas, he is not affirming they are invalid per se for reaching knowledge in the social sciences. As I will show in the following chapter, Taylor himself makes use —in A Secular Age and secularization- related texts— of works by sociologists and historians who use quantitative studies to build their arguments, which are referred to phenomena well delimited in time and space as well as in regard to culture.
However, the point he is trying to make is that knowledge in the social sciences does advance, but it does so through the comparison of interpretations. Nicholas H. He will find them to have a high degree of knowledge of themselves and of their context, an intuition of the inter-subjective language and common meanings they share with their own societies, of their own social imaginaries, and of the social theory prevalent in their own cultures.
He will also consider them able to contrast all the elements just mentioned with the corresponding ones from the people under study, and to establish the contrasts that would allow a deeper and broader interpretation than the ones in vogue.
As a logical consequence, the kind of sociological analysis he develops in A Secular Age has been regarded by several scholars, not surprisingly, as unconventional. In this sense, however unusual his approach might be, it is not a relativistic position. Of course, a number of methodological measures would be taken in order to avoid biasing the information collected, which includes the proper use of language, the order of the questions, the protocol for the survey, etc.
Implied in this data gathering process would be a particular research design, which would include a conceptualization of the variables at stake, of their measurement and about the operationalization of the latter. We would like to find out if the two mentioned variables are related, and, if so, in what way. Among other options, it could be the case that less frequent attendance would be the effect of inner dissent or, vice versa, that less frequent attendance would cause dissent.
Other scenarios could be that people still attend even when they are not completely willing to obey their religious leaders, or that no correlation was to be found. To find this out, the social scientist would take the information collected through the above-mentioned survey and make use of statistical methods.
In the first place, there are considerations about the mindset of those who phrased the survey questions, of those who chose what propositions to include in the semi- structured questions. However, this is not the most relevant criticism Taylor makes. A second and greater risk is to think it is possible to coach the propositions of the survey in a way that they would not be subject to interpretive dispute.
In a sense, it is through these propositions that we want to reflect in a way the inner world of the interviewee into the brute data coming out from the survey. However, according to Taylor, this is not completely so, because the meaning of religious obedience here is dependent on a field of inter-subjective meanings the interviewee shares with his family, friends and community.
While doing all this, the scientist could not avoid entering into thoroughly hermeneutic territory. In order to assess its object of study, the social sciences should be considered to be hermeneutical, that is proceeding in an interpretative circle, as mentioned.
A study of the science of man is inseparable from an examination of the options between which men must choose. Prognosis is almost impossible because conceptual innovation in turn alters human reality. This is hardly in the bounds of the possible. Both, inter-subjective and common meanings, are included in the notion of social imaginary Taylor uses as an interpretive devise in A Secular Age and other secularization- related works. In this clarifying language the possible human variations would be so formulated that both our form of life and that of people of a different culture could be perspicuously described.
In this way, in regard to a specific matter, one form of life could be superior or inferior in relation to the other, or both could be found equally wanting. As a result, it could be that either their understanding or ours may prove to be inappropriate or distorted in some respects. Or it could be that both understandings are.
0コメント