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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Charles Taylor claims that ‘… human life is constituted by self-understanding,’ a self-understanding which is achieved in part by our capacity to use language (9). Because of this, the philosophy of language is important in Taylor’s philosophical views and central to these are his views on expression. I shall argue that one way to understand Taylor’s theory of expression is to place it within a theory of speech acts. And I shall try to show that this gives us a way to interpret his contention that expression is a subject-related property and that there cannot be an objective science of it. Finally, I shall argue that Taylor’s grounds for the latter claim are defective and that this leaves open the possibility that there can be an objective science of expression.
1 All references to Taylor are to his Human Agency and Laguage: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985).
2 Professor Taylor's theory seems to be similar to Frege's, except that Professor Taylor identifies the linguistic meaning of a sentence with the thought, perception, or belief which the sentence is said to express. As Tyler Burge has pointed out, there are problems with this, but I shall not discuss them here. See his ‘Sinning Against Frege,’ Philosophical Review 88 (1979) 398-432.
3 Taylor assimilates expression in the visual arts and music with verbal and facial expression (218). However, our capacity to lie or to mislead in our speaking and in our facial expressions marks an important difference between the way we can be said to express our thoughts and emotions and the way in which a painting or a symphony can be said to express something. In what way could a symphony lie?
4 Placing expression within a theory of speech acts should not be seen as implying that this is contrary to Taylor's views about expression, for he holds that ‘the expressive conception gives a view of language as a range of activities in which we express/realize a certain way of being in the world’ (234).
5 Searle, John Expression and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Mackie, J.L. Problems From Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1976), 7-36CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Berkeley, George Two Dialogues Between Hylas and Philanous (New York: Liberal Arts Press 1954), 9-50Google Scholar
8 The view that physical and computational theories contain no such commitment, which is inherited from Hobbes and Locke, has been contested.
9 Goldman, Alvin A Theory of Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1970), 38-44Google Scholar