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Reply to Braybrooke and de Sousa*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Extract

These two interesting papers raise a number of important issues. I will limit myself, however, to drawing out some of the recurring questions, in order to keep myself from wandering too much down fascinating side alleys.

I cannot resist, however, beginning with what sounds like a digression. There is a lot of misunderstanding of what I was trying to say, especially in Braybrooke's paper. My author's reflex is to blame my readers. But a moment's quiet thought makes me aware of how far from totally clear I was. More than that, some of what is at issue between us is precisely the grid within which these questions should be debated. I am dissatisfied with the accepted way of putting some of these questions, and I want to propose new terms. It was inevitable that misunderstandings arise in these circumstances.

Type
Interventions/Discussions
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , Winter 1994 , pp. 125 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1994

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References

Notes

1 For instance, Taylor, Charles, “The Diversity of Goods,” in Philosophy and the Human Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Taylor, Charles, “The Validity of Transcendental Arguments,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1978-1979.Google Scholar

3 How does one show this? I discuss this issue at greater length in “The Validity,” but the answer in a nutshell seems to me to be this: we are appealing to the interlocutor's sense of what is involved in having an identity. We are appealing to the deliverances of agent's knowledge. I want to claim that with an undistorted grasp on what role an identity plays in our lives, we can just see that it couldn't be entirely without strong evaluation. The role of argument here, which can be considerable, is to clear away the misunderstandings, cross-purposes, red herrings, etc., in order for this intuition to be unobstructed.