This is slight departure from Taylor’s usual oeuvre. At first glance, this is a more scientific than philosophic endeavor. The book specifically deals with how, teleologically and historically, humans have used language—specifically how our species has used language to separate our mental representations from other animals. Taylor begins, “Linguistic beings are capable of new feelings which affectively reflect their rich sense of the world…. Linguistic beings can be sensitive to distinctions which are lost on prelinguistic animals. Important among these are distinctions involving moral or other values…. Only language beings can identify things as worthy of desire or aversion. For such identifications raise issues of intrinsic rightness. They involve a characterization of things which is not reducible simply to the ways we treat them as objects of desire or aversion. They involve a recognition beyond that, that they ought to be treated in one way or another…. Being in the linguistic dimension not only enables a new kind of awareness of the things which surround us, but also a more refined sense of human meanings…. Speech is the expression of thought. But it isn’t simply an outer clothing for what could exist independently. It is constitutive of reflective, that is, linguistic thought…. Our power to function in the linguistic dimension is tied for its everyday uses, as well as its origins, to expressive speech, as the range of actions in which it is not only communicated, but realized.”
Taylor makes the case that it is impossible to separate the growth of language from the evolution of human culture. “We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, and introduces a dimension of strong value…. We acquire the range of meanings which make up our world through an interplay of embodied expression, and of articulation…. Language allows us to think in universals, as we might say, using concepts and not just proper names…. To understand reality is to break it down into its component parts, and then map how they combine…. This epistemology stressed that our knowledge of the world was built from particulate “ideas”, or inner representations of outer reality. We combine them to produce our view of the world…. Reasoning is combining, and language helps us to do this expeditiously and on a grand scale.”
Language is more than just a third person-objective scientific description of the outer world and of nature. It is embodied in human reality and as such cannot be entirely separated from the subjective viewpoint. Taylor asks, “Would it be possible for us to drop all these other things: tropes, images, symbols, templates, and of course, gestures and literature, and just have this austere language of description and explanation? (I won’t even ask the question whether this would be desirable.) This is a question about human beings; we are not asking whether some kinds of beings which could be imagined could meet these austere and limiting specifications…. It is one of my basic claims in this book that this kind of restricted language is a human impossibility…. [There is an] impossibility of human language in the narrow sense outside the whole range of “symbolic forms”.”
Human language cannot be completely separated from subjective human expressions. “Possessing a language is to be continuously involved in trying to extend its powers of articulation. In other words, we always sense that there are things we cannot properly say, but we would like to express.” Taylor quotes the polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt, “[There is always a] feeling that there is something which the language does not directly contain, but which the [mind/soul], spurred on by language must supply.” Taylor continues, “This endless striving to increase articulacy is the real point behind the famous Humboldt saying about using finite means to infinite ends. The “finite means” here doesn’t refer to an existing stock of words, as the Chomskian interpretation seems to assume; rather it is the finite stock of sounds at our disposal, with which we can find expression for an unlimited range of phenomena…. What Humboldt is on to here is the experience of wanting to say what we cannot yet satisfactorily express…. We need to find a formula which figures the phenomenon we are trying to disclose, be this through metaphor, or analogy, or creative extension of existing terms, or whatever…. The “right word” here discloses, brings the phenomenon properly into view for the first time…. We devise an expression which allows what we are striving to encompass to appear.”
In using language to map our reality, Taylor is describing a generative process. “To grasp a new meaning is to discover a new way of feeling, of experiencing our world. This cannot precede expression…. The constitutive power of language operates here in different ways, one might say at a different level, than it does in our description of independent objects…. In the realm of metabiological meanings, expression opens new and unsuspected realms. The new enacted and/or verbal expressions open up new ways of being in the world. We are in the domain of cultural innovation…. Many of the meanings in our lives come to exist for us when we mark distinctions heretofore unnoticed in our life experience…. After articulation, it becomes part of the explicit shape of meaning for us…. Articulation here alters the shape of what matters to us. It changes us…. The new articulated descriptions allow the world to impinge on us, to moves us, in new ways. That is why we call them “constitutive”.”
Taylor concludes, “The basic thesis of this book is that language can only be understood if we understand its constitutive role in human life…. I have tried to explain this constitutive force of language in terms of the “linguistic dimension”, where the uses of either words or symbols, or expressive actions, is guided by a sense of rightness…. Linguistic awareness is not limited to that facet of the semantic dimension, where the designative logic prevails; in other words, to that set of language games where we are concerned with accurate description of independent objects…. Language is also used to create, alter, and break connections between people. This is indeed, ontogenetically its “primordial” use…. And language can also open new spaces of human meanings: through introducing new terms, and/or through expression-enactment…. It is through story that we find or devise ways of living bearably in time.”
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