Marketable methods

Education as psychology’s primary market

The fact is that from the beginning of the 20th c. psychology moved away from being a “pure science” to marketing its products. This meant that the market was able to influence the direction of the discipline’s investigatory practices. Practices that were useful in the construction of specific marketable products were more likely to receive a boost than those which did not produce such products.

Of course, the fact is that the discipline also had the resources to produce marketable products. Most notably,

(1) the Galtonian approach to individual differences and (2) the use of experimental treatment groups.

Both methodologies made psychology into a socially relevant discipline.

Of course, the availability of these two resources for socially relevant research also depended on the historical availability of institutions that would in fact avail themselves of these resources because they found them to be useful. One such institution was the field of education. It was the Herbartians of the 19th c. who laid the groundwork for this relationship between psychology and education (even though the Herbartians had little direct effect on the development of psychology). Charles Judd who was to have a prominent place in American educational psychology recalls, in1989 when he returned from Wundt’s lab and had been appointed professor at the School of Pedagogy at New York University, lecturing enthusiastically on Weber’s law to a class of teachers when he was interrupted by one gray-haired teacher auditor who asked “Professor, will you tell us how this law can in principle help us to improve my teaching of children”. Judd had no answer!

What was it that educationists (and the institution of public education) required?

Given the enormous differences in educational institutions and the social demands placed on schools in different countries, there was considerable national divergence in schooling. However, in the US the alliance between education and psychology was especially prominent even though what teachers required and what school administrators required was very different. Yet this link between psychology and education made psychology socially relevant. It should be noted of course that in the 1890s when psychologists like G. Stanley Hall became interested in child development, psychology’s contribution was fairly crude, restricted to a kind of psychological census taking, given the limited scientific background of teachers. Yet the important point was that there was established a conceptual link, even if very vaguely between psychology and education.

After the turn of the century, psychologists’ relationship with teachers became increasingly overshadowed by a new generation of professional educational administrators. This group took control of the educational systems adapting education to suit the changing order of corporate industrialism. The expansion of the American public educational system was nothing short of astonishing. Between 1890 and 1920 there was one public high school built each and every day and enrollment increases were of the order of 1000%. Between 1902 and 1913 public expenditure on education more than doubled and between 1913 and 1922 it tripled. In fact, professional educational administrators had little in common with classroom teachers. Indeed, this profession of

educational administrators distanced itself from frontline classroom teachers (teaching was deemed to be a transient, unrewarding, unprofessional and female task) and established their own university curricula, journals, etc., and by 1914 became what we might call CEOs of educational systems. It was this profession rather than teachers which was psychology’s first market.

Of course, professional educational administrators were not interested in psychology’s traditional experimental laboratory practices. Research for these professional administrators had to be relevant to their managerial concerns. This meant that research had to yield comparable quantitative data on the performance of large numbers of individuals (students) under restricted conditions (i.e., in schools). Occasionally, these professional administrators simply needed to justify the managerial decisions which they judged expedient for enhancing and maintaining the institution of public education. In fact, early educational administrators very frequently made use of an industrial metaphor: “education is a shaping process as much as the manufacture of steel rails”. Elaborate analogies were drawn between stockholders and parents, general managers of factories and superintendents of schools, foremen and principles, and industrial workers and teachers. Within that framework there was a natural carry-over from industry to education – both could be scientifically managed, which included:

1. measurement and comparison of comparable results,2. analysis and comparison of the conditions under which the results were secured –

especially the means and time it took to get the results,3. the consistent adoption and use of those means to justify themselves most fully by

their results, abandoning those that fail.

Obviously, this scheme assigned a very important role to research, especially points 1 and 2, above, in order that appropriate action might be taken and justified in point 3 above. Today we call this “outcome-driven research”.

Psychologists quickly responded to this scheme which required the kind of research that was very different from laboratory experimental studies or even the simply census-taking that characterized developmental psychology of child study by way of questionnaire. By 1910 a new Journal of Educational Psychology was established by Thorndike at Columbia Teachers College which saw a few traditional experimentalists like Carl Seashore and Edmund Sanford join the psychology devoted to “administration”. Sanford writes: “so long as the science must be financed by appropriations and endowments, the new psychology is called upon to furnish an effective defense against ignorant and hostile criticism and provide a tangible excuse for investment of institutional capital”.

What Sanford did not anticipate was that this alliance between psychology and educational administration would have consequences for psychology more profound than any contribution that psychology was likely to make to education. Thus

1. In the first place it broke with the kind of educational psychology that had been envisioned by the pioneering giants of American psychology such as William James, Baldwin, Hall and Dewey. These psychologists had envisioned a psychology of child study (of the child “mind”) but the new educational psychology demanded the management of (passive) children on the basis of performance measures so as to justify the allocation of financial resources.

2. But the new educational psychology proved popular because it could be extended to other domains as well, most notably the military administration during WWI. The methods of “mental” (test) measurement could be extended readily to the

military. The entire field of applied psychology was now devoted to usefulness in administrative contexts. During the 1920 and 1930s large numbers of psychologist sought to produce psychological knowledge in service of practical contexts so much so that one prominent psychologist Woodworth spoke of psychology changing affiliation from philosophy to education. What this shift in allegiance came down to was that if knowledge is to be practically useful it was so in marketable administrative contexts.

3. The links between social (economic-political) administration and psychology affected both. Psychological practices had social repercussions but the demands of administration also affected psychological investigation. Thorndike for example held that the science of education (administration) will contribute abundantly to psychology! The demands of the market profoundly affected the research practices of psychology such that research could produce the kind of knowledge that was useful to the administration and education, military, business and industry.

4. This kind of knowledge was obviously statistical. Thus it was not the individual (mind) that was of interest but rather the individual’s performance relative to the performances of groups of individuals (i.e., “statistically constituted collective subjects”). Dealing with individual in terms of categories was the essence of administrative practices.

5. But the demand of administration was more specific than this. It also wanted methods for comparison of conditions and the measurement of results. E. C. Sanford, President of Clark University and a distinguished psychologist researcher, identified three methods that psychology could contribute to education and any rationalized social practice:

(a) the standard laboratory study exemplified in German investigations of say memory by Ebbinghaus (a generation after Wundt),

(b). the work on individual differences as exemplified by the method of mental testing (Galton), and

(c) the classroom experiment (pioneered by W. H. Winch in England, see below) in which school children matched in mental ability would be exposed to different method of instruction (conditions/interventions) and their performance would be assessed before and after the intervention (say, different instruction formats). So that children were assed prior to the introduction of the intervention and then a again after the introduction of the intervention – pre and post intervention design.

The first (laboratory) and third methods (classroom experiment) compared the efficiency of different techniques of learning and instruction, the second method could be used to select individuals for certain programs (rather than the other way around).

6. If we examine these methods, we can begin with the second (individual differences – Galton) and third (classroom) methods: both individual differences and classroom experiments which depended heavily and directly on the educational market. I will examine the first experimental method later.

Mental testing (individual differences)

The too-ready marketability of mental tests profoundly affected the shape of psychological research (and the discipline of Psychology). After WWI there was an enormous expansion in the use of mental tests. This work had so little relation to the

more traditional forms of psychological experimentation that eventually it seemed as if there were two distinct disciplines of psychology: one experimental and the other based on correlational statistics used in mental testing. (the “experimental” versus the “psychometric” or correlational traditions).

Mental testing flourished because of interest in individual differences. However it should be obvious that the phrase “individual differences” is vague (it can refer to novelist’s work as readily as the psychologist’s) and indeed interest in individual differences preceded the work on mental testing (e.g., reaction time studies, somato-typing, physiognomy of the face, anthropomorphic measurements, and phrenology). What distinguished mental testing was not its interest in individual differences or its preference for quantitative methods, but rather the fact that the medium of mental tests severed the ancient link between psyche and soma and proposed to assess individual differences entire by measuring function. In practice this meant measuring performances in restricted situations. (Note no longer an interest in mind but in functional performances meaning performances in restricted situations to restricted response categories.)

This amounted to a redefinition of the object of investigation; thus, psychological differences were now defined in terms of differences in measures of individual performance. It was performance at uniform set tasks that counted psychologically (and not for example facial expression or artistic style). On this somewhat restricted basis a broadly conceived study of individual differences was entirely possible.

In fact, during the earlier periods prior to the quantitative study of individual differences (i.e., early in the 19th c.), most investigators were not interested in comparing individual performances as such, but in characterizing psychological types and human individuality. Thus, before Alfred Binet developed IQ tests, Binet worked on “individual psychology” where psychological performance measures were used to assess an individual’s style of functioning. William Stern distinguished between the study of human variety and the study of individuality and accorded the latter a much higher status. James Mark Baldwin had criticized Wundt’s experimental psychology for ignoring individual style which Baldwin too conceived of in typological terms.

What the development of mental testing did was to redefine the problem of individual differences (not in terms of typology or types but in terms of comparison of individual performances. Thus, the quality of a performance was no longer used to characterize the individual in terms of some universal type instead an individual’s performances measure was used to specify an individual’s position relative to an aggregate of individual performances. But in comparing an individual score to a group norm (mean) implies that characterizing an individual depends as much on the individual as it does on the group. The whole idea was that whatever individual characteristics were being measured these characteristics belonged to all individuals albeit in different quantities. Here is where we have the notion of a variable (as a universal characteristic that can be quantified in terms of different people’s values on the variable) and, ironically, rather than measuring the individual as different from other individuals, this method of mental testing actually eliminated individuals by reducing them to the abstraction of a collection of points in a set of aggregates.

So that the statistical measurement of individual differences really constituted the very antithesis of psychological individuality, even as it also served to express directly a very different concern namely the problem of conformity. The practice of setting up norms in terms of which individuals could be assessed was however only “psychological” by inference since the norms were those of social performances and therefore carried

powerful evaluative significance. Thus it was not an interest in the mental capacities that motivated the study of individual differences in performance but rather a way of assessing the individual who would most effectively conform to socially established criteria – ranging from “general intelligence” of the eugenicists to qualities needed to become a good salesman – all this was blatantly ideological and very practical.

Throughout the 19th c. individual differences were of interest because (1) individuals in liberal democracies could advance themselves in competition with others, and (2) industrial and administrative institutions depended on categories of individuals to manage their businesses. With enormous rise of industrialization and bureaucratically managed/administered institutions in the19th c. there were two phenomena of particular interest to psychological practice: education and the management of social deviance. To way to deal with these there were two corresponding forms of “examination”: medical and academic. The latter was dealt with the selection of senior administrators, the former with dealt with psychiatric patients or criminals who were assessed for moral fitness (mental hygiene). Later in the 19th c. this distinction became blurred (the social category of “fitness” became a psychological category of “ability”), and given the Darwinian influence the entire population was thought of as biologically fixed members of one class (everyone could be assessed/tested in terms of ability or some other psychological trait).

Psychology exploited and was exploited to contribute the scientific classification of these “examinations” and did so through the expanded use of the “collective subject” involving large scale natural (e.g., “age” and “sex”) and psychometrically (e.g., “IQ” or “good learners”) defined groups. Individuals were of interest only as representatives of aggregates. In “psychological clinics” there still remained some interests in individuals (as in Binet’s original effort to determine individual children who needed special educational opportunities to succeed) but insofar as this practice was to have a scientific basis it required statistical norms (of the collective subject). The gap between understanding the individual mind and understanding the individual in terms of statistical norms seemed unbridgeable.

Marketable mental testing ensured the dominant place in psychological research for a style of investigative practice that had been pioneered by Galton. This applied to the social construction of the investigative situation where some features of Galtonian anthropometry were exaggerated to the point of bizarre caricature in mass testing methods developed in the military and school systems (today this practice continues in university psychology departments). It also applied to the way in which statistical techniques were used to create the “objects” (collective subjects) that where in fact the real focus of the research (i.e., statistical distributions of scores contributed by a mass of individuals).

The ready adoption of the Galtonian model by a significant section of American psychology is not surprising if one considers the parallels between the situation faced by Galton and by early 20th c. American psychologists. Galton wanted to establish a social science of human heredity (which one could never do so through controlled experiments and so used statistical comparison of group attributes). American psychologists were interested in promoting socially relevant science involving aspects of human conduct and performance that was also not accessible to precise experimental study under controlled laboratory conditions. The emerging psychometrics (biometrics) offered a statistical technique (initiated by Galton and Pearson) which promised a way around the problem (of not being able to experiment). Something that looked like a science could apparently be created through statistical rather than experimental means.

Obviously, there is a problem about trying to establish knowledge claims on the basis of the Galtonian model. In the classical experiment the aim was to establish functional relationships between a (stimulus) variable under the experimenter’s control and the observers report (or later, when introspection was abandoned, the animal or human “response”), and therefore there was a fundamental asymmetry in evaluating functional relations was essential for making causal attributions (whether to the subject, stimulus effect, or both).

However, the situation is very different in the Galtonian model. Here the experimenter must make attributions in a situation over which he has no control. That is, the experimenter does not attempt to influence (intervene in) the situation and hence whatever functional relations there are (between different tests and test scores) are symmetrical in the sense that no cause can be attributed to any of the variables that are being tested. All that can be managed is to get a “covariance” (concomitant) measure (two things go together –a co-relation). The descriptive statistics of the Galton-Pearson school provide such measures. Thus, the co-relation constituted the functional relationship between variables. In contrast, in the traditional experimental model, statistics were only used to ensure reliability of observations.

Hence, American psychology became bifurcated in the kinds of knowledge claims it offered. At first this produced a great deal of confusion. Only gradually there emerged a kind of official doctrine: the ideal of research practice is one that combined the manipulative aspects of the experimental model with statistically constituted objects of investigation.

What was not noticed until much later that this “mix” deprived the experimental manipulation of its original rationale which was the production of some causal process in the individual psychophysical system. Interest had shifted to the statistical outcome of experimental trials as manifested in differences between individuals.

This was quite acceptable to many psychologists who saw their research as developing methods of social control of individuals (control enabled prediction and vice versa). Such a psychology had to use measurements in order to make predictions about future effects that could be taken into account by administrators, etc. In principle such predictions (reliably expected on the basis of previous measurements) could of course be made on a purely statistical basis. But that would require large-scale research consuming extended time. Psychology would have to be far better established as a discipline before it could muster the resources for such research. Even then the social organization of research especially individual professional academic career patterns favored small studies in brief time.

It is therefore not surprising that the Galtonian method did not establish its claim to social relevance on the basis of sophisticated long-term statistical studies. Of course, there was a highly effective short-cut available – namely to hitch the wagon to the prevailing preconceptions regarding causation in human affairs. Those preconceptions prescribed that human interaction was to be interpreted as an effect of stable, inherently causal factors characterizing each and every separate individual. The most important of these were defined as psychological in nature, intelligence and temperament to begin with. Such factors were causal in the sense that they set rigid limits for individual action and were themselves unalterable. We see here the link between hereditarian dogma and the whole motivation for the eugenics program.

We see this in the reliance on the normal distribution which was thought to be the distribution of biological traits - the same in everyone except that everyone has slightly different values of the biological variables. Even where the hereditarian preconception was dropped in favor of the environment (e.g, with Watson’s behaviorist declaration), the distribution of psychological characteristics commitment remained in place.

The transformation of the old psychology of group differences by Galton resulted in an important development in the nature of groups that were carriers of psychological attributes. Originally, psychology had simply adopted the social categories (age and sex), but Galtonian use of statistics greatly facilitated the artificial creation of new groups whose defining characteristic (usually IQ performance) was based on the performance on some psychological test. A score on a mental test (these tests could be based on any category whatever from IQ to self-esteem to extroversion etc. etc.)) conferred membership in an abstract collectivity created for the purposes of psychological research. This opened up untold vistas for such research because psychologists could create these kinds of collectivities ad infinitum and then explore the statistical relationships between them.

Origins of the treatment group

I noted in the first half of the 20th c. psychology came to rely increasingly on the construction of “collective subjects” for generating knowledge claims. Such constructed collectivities were not found outside psychological practice but depended on the intervention of the investigator. Three types of artificial collectivities were distinguished.

1. Those that were the result of averaging the performance of individuals subjected to similar experimental conditions. This first type represented an outgrowth of the traditional experiment procedures (Wundt etc.).

2. Those that were constituted from scores obtained by some use of psychometric testing. This type owes its existence to the demands placed on psychological practice by the market place education and industry).

3. Those that were produced by subjecting groups of individuals to different treatment conditions – and this type also appear to have been produced by the market.

We have seen that for example educational administrators (efficiency experts) expected that (a) psychological research could provide methods of measurement that would permit the comparison of results (comparing the performance of the individual to that of the group). This was fulfilled in “mental tests”. But they also expected that (b) psychology could evaluate the effects of various kind so intervention (say different teaching strategies or programs). To evaluate the efficiency of these different interventions, what was needed was a way of comparing the individuals who were the recipients of these different interventions. Traditional experimental psychology was of little help here because it focused on the individual mind alone.

Here the pioneering work of W. H. Winch in England was important. Winch was a school inspector and he was interested in assessing the effectiveness of various classroom conditions on such factors of mental fatigue and transfer of training in students. To do this, he subjected equivalent groups of children to different conditions, and taking relevant measures before and after the intervention (pre-post test design or quasi-experimental designs). There was nothing surprising about this method. Schools were under great pressure and individual students were not important compared to the overall effective functioning of the classrooms.

What is interesting about these early classroom studies is that they took place in an institutional environment that allowed for the easy manipulation of intervention conditions. Thus, studies of work efficiency (in industry) readily took on experimental form. This work assessing the effects of varying work conditions on outcome productivity provided strong incentive for combining the use of group data with the experimental method. Treatment group approaches to research (the group defined by the treatment or intervention it was given) quickly became popular in the research journals. But unlike the educational classroom studies (which were restricted to the classroom and work at school), the work efficiency studies were concerned not just fatigue in the particular situation of the classroom but with fatigue and learning in general or in the abstract (in any situation).

The history of the treatment group methodology ran somewhat differently in applied psychology than it did laboratory research. By the 1920s the treatment group procedure was being sold in the US as the “control experiment” and as the best way to evaluate the effects of various conditions of work efficiency. It also became the textbook method of educational psychology: “experimentation pays in terms of cash”. Technically the treatment method of defining groups became quite sophisticated expounding on randomization and complex experimental designs some two years before R. A. Fisher (1925) published his well-known text on the topic.

Yet in spite of these promising beginnings, the history of the treatment group methodology was not exactly a success (as judged by the number of studies reported in J of Educational Psychology or the J of Applied Psychology between 1915 and 1936). For one thing there was almost no demand for this kind of methodology outside the educational context, for another the research occurred in institutional setting that allowed for little variation conditions of intervention. There was also disappointment with the results, and the claims made for the quantitative and experimental method had been wildly optimistic. Moreover, the shape of this kind of research was always at the mercy of bureaucracies and institutional requirements, and once the “cult of efficiency” was over, the expansion of this kind of research declined.

More generally there were always limits on the use of the experimental approach in institutions that were geared to practical goals and interests. Not only can measurement be a practical nuisance in these contexts but it also can be seen as a threat to vested interests and traditional practices of the established power groups. Although psychologists could help in selecting individuals for pre-established programs, and could also help in the selection of different programs, the former was clearly the safer bet (or else risk upsetting the power that be).

Obviously this situation is very different in the laboratory where experimentation could be safely used as the preferred method. Thus, in the safety of the university laboratory, the kind of experimentation that had emerged in the applied setting could evolve into a vehicle for the fantasy of an omnipotent science of human control (as some saw psychology). Moreover, in its eagerness to become an autonomous science, American psychology was not inclined to humbly serve the educational or industrial work settings as so serve as “psychological technicians”; rather, they saw what children or workers did in school or factory as merely an instance of the operation of “generalized laws of learning” etc. that manifested themselves in all of human behavior. Thus, the treatment group methodology became, in the hands of an ambitious science, a methodology for providing the basis for universal laws of

human behavior. By 1936, 35% of the J of Experimental Psychology used this methodology.

Thus, academic psychology was not interested in assessing the effect of specific interventions in specific institutional contexts (what we today might refer to as “quality control research”); rather, academic psychologists were interested in interventions or treatments that affected all human behavior in all conceivable contexts. Here we have the pretentious claim that practical efforts to enhance performance was like “engineering” whereas the science of psychology sought the universal effects of intervention/treatment on all behavior and as such was like “physics”. The abstract laws of learning (during the heyday of behaviorism in the1920-1950s) were deemed to be like the laws of physics. Of course physics had to solve the problem of the variability of observations and the uniformity of laws but this was done by showing that errors (individual differences) in observation obeyed statistical regularities (relegated to “error variance”). This assumption allowed psychologists to retain their faith in the existence of abstract universal laws even as they were daily confronted by human and animal variability.

The faith in universal laws produced an interpretation of variability in observations in terms of an assumption that individual behavior varied continuously on a common set of dimensions (a common “human nature”). This gave rise to a distinction between genuine laws of behavior and mere generalizations based on statistical observations. If this distinction could be avoided – and it certainly was – then the variability in observations could be turned into an advantage. Groups could be assessed in terms of the mean and standard deviation which made it terribly easy to produce generalizations (every experiment finds some “effects”!) which could then be expressed as “laws” (provided one lived in an academic culture that did not distinguish between statistical and psychological laws, of course). This accounted for the popularity of group experiments in “pure” (versus applied) psychology….

This pure psychology was really an abstract form of the practice of controlling the performance of large numbers of individuals by way of environmental intervention. Thus, the fundamental laws were relationships between these environmental interventions and changes in response to such interventions. Obviously for a science that aspired to laws between environment and response, treatment group methodology in practical contexts served very well indeed. In transferring this kind methodology to the laboratory one can construct a model of the kind of world that is presupposed by the laws of the new science (bells of scientific materialism!). It is a world wherein individuals are stripped of their identity (their historical existence as individuals) and then become vehicles of the operation of totally abstract laws of behavior/environment defined over abstract collective subjects.

Thus, the treatment group method was ideally suited for establishing knowledge claims about the relationship between abstract external influences and equally abstract organisms.

Taking the same group of subjects through the same set of environmental variations could be used for this purpose (and was) but this approach provided subjects with a bit of history (even though it was only specially constructed experimental history) and this meant that the results could not be unambiguous interpreted. Only the treatment group could provide a practical construction that the so-called pure science of behavior required. As the use of treatment groups increased, the empirical basis for questioning the prevailing shape of psychological theory became narrower. That is,

treatment group gave the kind of results that the theory of universal laws presupposed, namely that there are lawful relations between treatment intervention (environment) and behavior/response.

To say or not to say

The problem with “perception/cognition” language is that words like “know”, “aware of”, and “conscious of” are all linked to the metaphor of seeing (or in more contemporary terms ‘representation”) which is essentially a passive (“re-presenting”) taking in of the world (in perceiving, believing, and knowing). But as I pointed out the phenomenon of “becoming conscious…” (in seeing that, believing that) remains a very puzzling one (one that is usually by-passed in cognitive discourse).

Instead, I proposed that “becoming conscious of…” is inherent in, or the result of, the exercise of a skill, namely the skill of “saying” (articulation/expression in language) how we are engaged (see, experience, act, etc.) in the world. Thus, I rejected the notion that consciousness is a mirror that “re-presents” the world; rather, “becoming conscious of…” is a “spelling out” of the way we find ourselves engaged in the world.

“Spelling out” is to make explicit, to say something in a fully elaborate manner, to make clear (to give “shape” to) what one is doing, seeing, knowing, experiencing (i.e., how one is engaged). This making explicit is not necessarily to speak/write (but it is analogous to speaking or writing) but using language is one way “of becoming conscious of…” There is much to be said here, but one thing is clear that much of how we are engaged in the world (find ourselves in the world) need not be spelled out and hence we need not become explicitly conscious of….we may be conscious of how we live but we need not be explicitly conscious of how we live. So minimally we require at least two conceptions of “consciousness”: (1) at the level of “lived experience” (reflexive awareness), and (2) at the level of explicit consciousness (articulation) where we have spelled out our lived experience.

Why would we spell-out our lived experience; why not simply live it? Obviously we could not, even if we tried, to spell out every detail of our lived experience (how would we know that or when we had in fact done so?), and when we do, we presumably have some reason or interest in doing so, for we do so very selectively. In other words, explicit consciousness is not something we should take for granted; rather, we should take its absence for granted and then understand “becoming explicitly conscious of…” as something we achieve (consciousness is something to be achieved) in spelling out as a specific skill that we exercise only selectively on specific occasions. Moreover, we exercise this skill of spelling out once we have appraised/evaluated our engagement in the world and find reasons for (not) spelling out our engagement. The notion of prior appraisal here is a difficult one since obviously in a way appraisal itself depends on our capacity for language. By appraisal I mean a “pre-conceptual understanding” that is reflexively part of lived experience/understanding. Thus, we have a pre-conceptual understanding of the way we find ourselves in the world (intuitively, if you like) and at some level this obviously involves our being aware of the way we live, but then we have to exercise the skill (learned/acquired) of spelling out this intuitive (reflexive) awareness so that we become explicitly conscious (on which we can then reflect).

The exercise of this skill of spelling out is itself a way of being engaged in the world; that is, a way of being in the world reflectively. Thus, becoming explicitly conscious that we are (more or less) explicitly conscious (in having spelled out some of our engagements) is to be in the world reflectively/consciously. Evidently, the transition between the reflexive understandings of lived experience to the reflection (or “thinking”) on how one lives is mediated by the exercise of the skill of spelling out. Moreover if this transition is not disjunctive and it is neither clear just when we are explicitly conscious or if explicit consciousness is ever complete/finished (to what end?). If we consider that life “pushes” us ever forward, the task of becoming explicitly conscious of how we live (are lived, social-culturally or historically) is never complete. [For presumably to have spelled out on a particular occasion changes us enough such that we will have to do so again as life relentlessly pushes us forward.]

Thus, the phenomenon of self-deception must be understood within this volition-action framework (i.e., wherein I may or may not – volition – spell-out my engagements - action/practice). A first description of self-deception is as follows.

The person who is self-deceived is someone who on the basis of his appraisal of his engagements has overriding reasons not to explicitly spell-out the way he is engaged in the world. That is, on the basis of his reflexive understanding that is implicit in his lived experience such a person skillfully or systematically avoids spelling out how he lives in the world. Or he refuses (for whatever reason – hence “intentionally”) to spell out (refuses to become explicitly conscious of) how he lives.

Now in so refusing to become explicitly conscious of how one is engaged, the person also avoids reflecting on his refusal to spell-out his engagement (since presumable to do so would require that he be explicitly conscious of how he is engaged).

In tying consciousness to spelling out (and so to language) we must take note of two caveats.

(1) Not all uses of language, all speaking, is spelling out and hence becoming conscious. In fact most of our speaking/writing does not lead us to become explicitly conscious (most speaking I phatic or else fails to spell out our relationship to the world as we are engaged in it), and in understanding what the other person says we usually do not spell out our understanding of the other (in fact, most often we do not) and so we avoid becoming explicitly conscious of the other’s sense/origin of meaning (or, of the significance of what the other says in relation to ourselves). Thus, using language is not necessarily to spell out and so becoming conscious of. (Here is the example of the actor who is speaking but not explicitly spelling out his engagement in the world but we might just as well take as an example anyone who uses language to distance him/herself from others or the implications of his/her words.)

(2) One might spell out how one finds oneself in the world in ways other than language, or better in the context of language but in forms of social practices that are embedded in language but are themselves not speck practices. Thus, one might well spell out how one is engaged in the languages of art, ritual, incantations, meditations, celebration, etc. The question that rises in this context is whether these forms of spelling out in fact lead to becoming explicitly conscious of…I want to allow that they do

Tying spelling out to explicitly consciousness is minimally a claim that this is something only a person can do for him/herself. Thus, while I can describe your engagement in the world (e.g., I can describe what “subjects’” in experiments are doing) I am only describing what I take to be another’s consciousness in being in the world (I am only spelling out what I take to be my engagement in the world in relation to the other) but I cannot spell out another’s engagement as s/he is engaged – the other must do so for him/herself. This claim aligns well with Charles Taylor’s notion of “agency” (being a person) which the latter defines in terms of “what matters” to me. Or what is fundamental to being a human agent is that “things matter” to me and that I can spell out “what so matters” to me in an original way.

We can then hazard a second description of self-deception as follows.

In general, someone who is self-deceived is someone of whom it is patently characteristic that even when normally appropriate, s/he persistently avoids spelling out some aspect of the way s/he is engaged. This avoidance may be understood by others as a person’s inability to admit the truth to him/herself even thought s/he must know in his heart it is so. This implies a kind of genuineness is his/her ignoring (how s/he lives), and hence s/he is not merely hypocritical or lying to others. Yet we also fell that in some sense the person could admit the truth (i.e., spell out and become explicitly conscious) if only s/he would. It is a kind of “willful (intentional) ignorance” as Soren Kierkegaard calls it.

Now this kind of avoidance in spelling out (i.e., willful ignorance) is not due to an inability or lack of will-power but rather it is due to the self-deceiver’s tacitly “adopted” policy. Thus, when the person does not spell out this means he will not spell out where this “will not” refers to a general policy commitment (and not to some ad hoc decision not to spell out). What is here at issue is the distinction between what we might call the motive for self-deception and the intention to self-deception. No doubt self-deception has motives (such as fear or anxiety) but the self-deceiver avoids spelling out his/her engagement (and along with it the motives for his/her engagement) as a matter of adherence to a policy of saying nothing about how he lives.

Therefore the self-deceiver:

1. says nothing (does not spell out his/her engagement) or remains silent,2. yet gives the impression to others that he could spell out his/her engagement, if

only s/he would,3. but also gives the impression to others that she has rendered him/herself incapable

of spelling out his/her engagement.

We then asked “why would the self-deceiver commit him/herself to a policy of not spelling out (of not becoming explicitly conscious about how s/he is engaged and so admit the truth of how s/he is engaged)?” Obviously, this is not because we do not ordinarily spell out our engagements since, as noted above, this is common enough. Rather, whatever reasons for not spelling out his/her engagements, these reasons also serve for not spelling out our prior appraisal and adoption of a commitment to a policy of not spelling out. For it is obvious that if the self-deceiver were to spell out his policy of not spelling out, he would also have to spell out his engagement. But the self-deceiver has committed himself not to spell out his engagement. Hence the reason for not spelling out his adherence to a policy of not spelling out is also the same reason for not spelling out his implicit appraisal of his engagement.

Example: I have good reason for not spelling out even to myself that I have failed in realizing my ambition. Consequently I adopt a policy of not spelling out my failure of ambition. This policy now obligates me to not spell out the appraisal of my failure in realizing my ambition and also of adopting the tactic of not spelling out this policy. For it should be obvious that if I were to spell out the tactic of adopting a policy of not spelling out, I would have to spell out my failure in achieving my ambition (and there presumably good reasons for not doing so –what are they?). The policy is that I not even spell out this policy to myself and hence the policy is a “self-covering policy”, the adoption of which is never to make the policy explicit.

Now evidently such a self-covering policy is very different from not spelling out something on a particular occasion for one or other reason (presumable something very common - and I can always spell out when I am demanded or cared to do so at some future time). The self-covering policy is not something we can spell out even when it is demanded of us say by others who note that we are seemingly always silent about some engagement and then demand to know why).

In other words, the self-covering policy (which I adopt “automatically” based on reflexive appraisal, and hence not intentionally and so is not open to explicit consciousness) in our normal course of living life and spelling out our engagements in the world, leaves “gaps” or “breaks” in our living as we approach the hidden area in question. Thus, certain memories, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, desires, actions, etc., which may otherwise be readily spelled out are now not spelled out (avoided) even when, and especially when, the occasion is appropriate for spelling out.

Thus, the self-covering policy generates “cover stories” or attempts to fill-in the gaps or breaks in explicit consciousness. We create cover stories in order to mask/disguise, rationalize/intellectualize our not spelling out our engagements. These cover stories are at variance with how in fact we are engaged and so require ever greater ingenuity to make them plausible and protect us from having our silence detected by other, and especially ourselves. In other words, we confabulate in sense of self by building a façade of integrity, on risk that otherwise we lose our integrity or sense of self. In a way we create personal myths – myths that are rationalizations of our absence of integrity in the eyes of others – even as we are no not explicitly conscious of this lack of integrity we may be reminded of our lack of integrity (our silences) by others.

In this context of cover stories, or what I have called personal myths, we can raise the distinction between “merely saying” (confabulations/myths) and “sincerely saying”. Thus, the paradox of self-deceiver’s sincere insincerity is generated by the ambiguity in the notion of sincerity. When are we sincere? Fingarette suggest that we can explicate the ambiguity of this notion of sincerity now that we have in place the concept of becoming explicitly conscious in terms of the skill of spelling out.

But first we must get rid of the common notion that sincerity requires that a person’s behavior/conduct conforms to his explicit declarations of his conduct/behavior (consistency of action and words). This is the notion of sincerity that cognitive dissonance theories have in mind. I want to resist this notion that if a person’s behavior does not match his words we have an instance of self-deception (e.g., while John declares his loyalty in friendship on every occasion he is so easily swept up in his emotions that his declaration of friendship does not demonstrate itself in action – this is reason to question John’s sincerity in what he says but it does not indicate that John is self-deceived – he is simply “flighty” and John is merely mistaken in taking his declarations of loyalty for enduring commitment in action).

What we do always mean when using the word sincerity is conformity between what a person tells himself and what he tells others. Formally the criteria for this “deeper sense of sincerity” are as follows.

1. It is not the case that there is an intentional difference in the way a person spells out his engagement to others and how he spells out his engagement to himself.

2. The way a person spells out his engagement to himself reflects that engagement correctly.

3. The person is not intentionally wrong in the way he expresses his engagement.

If (1) does not hold there seems to be an intentional difference between the way a person spells out his engagement to himself and how he spells out his engagement to others. Such a person is not sincere (he does not tell us what he tells himself – or his public declarations are at variance with his private ones).

If (1) does not hold but (2) does (he spells out his engagement correctly to himself but he does not tell others the same thing). In this case we have someone who lies/deceives (he tells himself what is the case but he tells others something differently).

If (1) and (2) hold but (3) does not, the person is intentionally wrong in the way he spells out his engagement), and we have a kind of shallow sincerity (characteristic of someone who is irresponsible, impetuous, erratic etc.). Such a person tells others what he tells himself and what he tells himself is the way things are for him but he nevertheless gives the impression that he is in some sense unskillful in how he spells out his engagements…he does not spell them out accurately.

If (1) and (3) hold, then the person is sincere for if (1) and (3) hold then normally (2) also holds. To say that (2) normally holds is to say that normally a person tells himself the truth about the way he is engaged.

Now the odd but not so rare case is when (2) does not hold but (1) and (3) do hold. The person tells himself what he tells others, and he is not intentionally wrong in the way he spells out his engagements, but he does not spell out his engagements as he is really engaged (or, as we would spell out his engagements if we were him). Such a person is sincere at first glance for he tells others what he tells himself about his engagements, and he is not intentionally wrong about how he spells out his engagements, but the more we observe him in time, the more we are convinced that something is awry. Thus, we see that the story he tells others is the same as the story he tells himself, and he is not intentionally wrong about how he spells out the story, rather he seems purposefully wrong in that the story is not accurate about he is in fact engaged. This then is the deeper sense of insincerity.

Thus, we say that this person seems to believe what he says (and he says to himself what he says to us) yet he seems to be fooling himself. This is puzzling precisely because we are not used to thinking of explicit consciousness as a form of spelling out but are still stuck in the old perception/cognition way of thinking about consciousness as just mirroring the world as it is. In focusing on this perception/cognition conception of consciousness, we fail to appreciate the consequences of the banal truth that what a person tells himself (spells out) is highly selective, purposeful or intentional and therefore a person may tell himself what is not so.

The more we come to appreciate that (2) does not hold in particular circumstances (i.e., the more a person seems to be inaccurate in spelling out his engagement), the more deem the person to be self-deceived. Similarly, the more we overlook the importance of (2) (accuracy in saying how we are engaged) in favor of (1) (consistency in telling himself what he tells others), the more we insist on his sincerity. Thus, we argue that the person must be sincere since he tells us what he tells himself, but what is troublesome is he is not accurate in what he says about how he is engaged. [We note here the social circumstances of evaluating of another person’s self-deception (lack of sincerity), we spell out and compare what we would experience where we in his shoes compared to how he spells out his engagement.]

All this is very much more complicated by the fact that we, including the self-deceiver, take very seriously what we tell ourselves (surely I am sincere if I tell myself what I tell others!). For when we take ourselves (too?) seriously we tend to act in a way that reflects our understanding (our spelling out) and so increases the potential for self-deception in that we fail to spell out our engagement correctly as in (2) above, and in trying to be consistent with what we have already spelled out before. That is, we take great pride in consistency (as “sincerity”) as to what we tell ourselves over time….often at the neglect or merely selectively as to how we are in fact engaged. In this way we built our personal identity (myth) by very selectively spelling out our engagements even as we are increasingly removed from how we are really engaged in the world. This is self-deception as it forms over/in time or as we live (are lived with others).

Here follow examples from Moliere’s Le Misanthrope and O’Neil’s The Iceman cometh.

Summary

Because we take sincerity to be consistency (in what we say about our engagements over time), we consider another person to be sincere if he tells himself what he tells others. Yet in time the person’s actions may be such that our descriptions of them are at variance with what he spells out for himself and us. This leads us to conclude that the person must know what he is doing (truth) yet we are placed in doubt/conflict because he does not spell out his engagements the way we might. Thus, in a way the person is sincere, yet he must know in his heart he knows the truth; in a way he believes what he says, yet at bottom he couldn’t possibly believe it.

But rather than asking “does he really know” or ”how can he act this way and not really know it is at variance with what he tells himself and us?” we should ask “How is he engaged in the world?” and “does he express that engagement accurately?” Note here once again the social (communal) aspect of evaluating self-deception in others – and also note how difficult it is because, remember, spelling out is only something a person can do for himself.

However, when we discern in time that there is an intentional/purposeful discrepancy between how a person is engaged and the story he tells himself and others about how he is engaged, we have a person who is self-deceived. Note that the crux of this understanding of self-deception resides in the phrase “becoming explicitly conscious of…” as the skill of spelling out rather than in resorting to the language of perceiving/cognizing which inevitable leads us back to the paradoxes of self-deception. 2).

Of course, none of this is the complete story about self-deception/consciousness. Thus, why does a person not spell out his engagements even when it is appropriate to do so? Or

why would a person keep himself from becoming conscious of the way he is engaged in the world?

Obviously it may well be advantageous to lie (telling others what is not so). But what advantage is thereto not spelling out one’s engagements to oneself? What reasons could we possible have for skillfully avoiding spelling out our engagements in the world?

Finally, note that my characterization essentially involves others. The self-deceiver alone would never come to the conclusion that s/he is self-deceived. Perhaps this is what is at the root of the notion that one comes to self-knowledge only in the context of conversation/dialogue with others, and this in turn invokes the language of tradition/history (MacIntyre and Taylor and in a more tangentially way Kohut and Lacan whom we will examine later).

Taylor

Taylor shifts gears in this chapter. Having put in place his expressivist thesis in chapters 9 and 10, he now will explore expressivist concepts to examine the notion of what it is to be a “responsible human agent” or what is it to be a “person”. Taylor begins with Frankfurt’s claim that human agents are different from other agents in that human agents are able to form “second-order desires”, namely that human agents, unlike say infra-human agents, are able to evaluate their desires; able, that is, to engage in self-reflection in rejecting some and accepting others of their desires. Thus, Frankfurt suggests that human agents’ capacity to evaluate their desires is bound up with self-reflection/evaluation, and Taylor agrees.

However, Taylor suggests a further distinction with a view of clarifying this capacity we posses to evaluate our desires (by way of self-reflection). Taylor proposes that we distinguish between two broad kinds of evaluation. Taylor claims that what is missing in Frankfurt’s “second order desires” is the notion that evaluation is “qualitative”. That is, not only can we reject or accept some or other desire that is ours but we can also do so either (1) in terms of the outcome of our desires, or (2) in terms of the qualitative conditions of worth of our desires. These are two very different ways of evaluating our desires: weak and strong evaluation. Thus, in accepting or rejecting one or other of our desires, we make a choice in terms of their respective outcomes, but in evaluating our desires in terms of conditions of worth we make no choice at all, one desire is simply higher, more virtuous, more fulfilling, more refined, more profound, more noble than another desire, and hence it clearly is the preferred desire.

Now Taylor warns us that “weak’ evaluation does not necessarily mean that the desires between which we must choose are “homogeneous” (that the two desires that can be characterized in the same manner as to their desirability) or that our evaluation of the two desires can be quantified (the rational aim of utilitarianism to be able to calculate the respective “desirability” of our desires). Utilitarianism in ethics has tried to do away with qualitative distinctions of worth on the grounds that such conditions of worth are an illusion hiding the real bases of our preferences which can be quantified. Thus, the utilitarian hopes that once we do away with strong evaluation (in terms of conditions of worth) we can calculate which desire is preferable (which results in the most pleasure or

avoids the most pain). But as Taylor points out this is mythical quantification in terms of which the fulfillment of one desire is “more fun” or “less fun”. Utilitarianism is certainly right in rejecting evaluation in terms of conditions of worth at least if utilitarianism aspires to reduce practical reason in strongly evaluating desires to mere calculation.

More importantly, weak evaluation is not just concerned with the outcomes of our desires either for we can choose between desires (as Frankfurt claims, we can have “second order” desires) but, as Taylor points out, these need not be strong evaluations or choices. Thus, one can desire not to have a desire, or one can desire a desire one does not yet have and still not engage in strong evaluation. Rather, Taylor’s distinction between two kind of evaluation, weak and strong, does not depend on the quantitative-qualitative evaluation nor on the presence or absence of second order desires (as Frankfurt claims), rather the distinction between weak and strong desires depend on conditions of worth and this includes two interlocking criteria.

(1) In weak evaluation a desire is good if it is desired, whereas in strong evaluation the desire must be evaluated in terms of conditions of worth.

(2) Hence, in case of weak evaluation the choice between desires is simply their contingent incompatibility, but in case of strong evaluation the choice between desires is all about their worth (note the “moral” or normative implications).

Now Taylor claims that this notion of worth turns on what I deem to be worthy as a mode of life, as the kind of person I am or aspire to be. Note that here the incompatibility of desires is no longer contingent (a matter of circumstances) rather it has to do with what I deem to be a worthy life.

The reason is that in case of strong evaluation the language of the conditions of worth is deployed contrastively (this harks back to the notion of language as “web”). Thus, the characterization of my desires in strong evaluation is expressed in a contrastive language. This fact marks strong evaluation as very different from weak evaluation. [As Taylor notes in a footnote, it might be objected that the utilitarian also uses such qualitatively contrastive words such as “pleasure” and “pain” but in fact the utilitarian does not use these words contrastively holding that it is only pleasure that is desired. If in reply the utilitarian claims that the desire of pleasure is here contrasted with the desire to “avoid pain”, Taylor notes that it is precisely this contrast that utilitarianism has failed to make. Taylor also notes that “time” per se is not contrastive rather time is used circumstantially. In fact, there are many ways to describe my desire that are seemingly contrastive but in fact are not. What distinguishes weak from strong evaluation is the contrastive characterization of desire in case of strong evaluation, for in strong evaluation of our desires we employ the language of evaluative distinctions (and not merely circumstantially conflicting or contingently conflicting) wherein which the contrast between desires is “deeper”.]

Strong evaluations (characterizing my desires, interests, attitudes, aspirations, etc. in a contrastive language of worth), leads inevitably to a conflict of interpretations. Which characterization of my desires I adopt will shape (realize and clarify) the meaning “things” have for us. Note here, not just the desires as “objects” themselves (subjective) but the desires of…something, meaning also the objects to which our desires are directed. Here we have Taylor using the notion of “expression” (of desires) to overcome the subject-object distinction. That is, the characterization of desires includes the characterization of the things/actions we desire.

Taylor then immediately raises the question of which characterization (of desire) is more faithful, valid, to reality? But note here that in asking this question Taylor is in some sense backtracking for the characterization of desires in terms of conditions of worth also characterizes the object towards which the desires are directed in terms of the conditions of worth. In other words, to ask about a “reality” outside of our strong evaluation returns us to a subject-object bifurcation which expressivism rejected.

The strong evaluator in envisioning the alternatives in terms of conditions of worth possesses a richer language wherein to reflect on the alternatives. Thus, unlike the weak evaluator who merely weighs the alternatives and then calculates the consequences of each, the strong evaluator is able by way of his contrastive language to reflect on the alternatives terms of their worth (to life, his/her life) and the kind of person s/he is. Hence, the strong evaluator when confronted by alternative desires can articulate the alternative desires in terms of conditions of worth (and therefore as we have seen in Ch. 9 and 10 understands the “reality” of these desires very differently) and hence can reflect in choice in articulating a very different “reality”. Reflection is here not calculation of consequences of desires as “objectively” given, but reflection (and choice) on very different (deeper) experiences (realities) that are constituted in our articulations of conditions of worth. We are now, in strong evaluation, reflecting on the alternatives of desires in terms of the kind of person I am and the kind of life I live.

The kind of articulacy and depth the strong evaluator possesses also raises the possibility of a plurality of visions that a weak evaluator lacks. That is, the kind of predicament (in a conflict of desires) the strong evaluator confronts results in a struggle of self-interpretations (interpretations that profoundly affect the kind of self I am) as to which characterization (of desire and choice) is more authentic, illusion-free, genuine, authentic, and so resolves the apparently incommensurability of my desires through articulacy. Taylor makes the strong point that without this capacity to strongly evaluate our desires, we would lack the minimum degree of reflection (note reflection here depends on articulacy) that we associate with human agency and its capacity for choice (exercise of the will). Thus, freedom of will depends on reflection and reflection depends on articulacy (exactly the reverse of the weak evaluator – the designator!).

Taylor then shifts perspective in his examination of the self by turning towards the question of responsibility within the context of evaluating desires, for the notion of responsibility is bound up with this capacity to evaluate desires. We might have anticipated this of course, given that freedom depends on articulacy and so responsibility insofar at it relies on freedom must also be tied to articulacy.

There is one sense of responsibility that is already implicit in the notion of “will”. If we are capable of evaluating (weak or strong) our desires we may find that these are in conflict such that one presses more than another (or we will one against the other which presses more strongly: here the notion of “ought” emerges). That is, evaluation of desire already presupposes a sense of will and with it an elementary sense of responsibility (in willing/evaluating one over the other – as Frankfurt points out in case of second order desires).

But this is not the sense of responsibility that Taylor wants. Not only are we agents because we can evaluate and be held responsible for choosing one, acting on one, over another desire, but we are responsible for the evaluations of the desires themselves. This is a much stronger sense of evaluation, and hence of responsibility, for here evaluation is itself an activity we are engaged in [on the analogy of speech being activity we are engaged in when using language]. Thus, reflection on desires (evaluating them) already

invokes our responsibility. Taylor asks how are we understands this stronger sense of responsibility?

One way to understand it (a way that is characteristic of our modern era) is as “choice”. Thus, the notion of “value” suggests that we create values (“evaluation”). But Taylor objects that this way of understanding responsibility of evaluations as choice suggest that we merely choose (“radical choice”) without reason (since our values are our own creations). Or if we do base our evaluations on reasons, then these reasons are taken as simply valid (and not themselves chosen). This is the view that Taylor attributes to Jean-Paul Sartre.

The problem with this view (of radical choice or that we are radically free) is that if this is true then we can no longer see ourselves as strong evaluators, agents with depth. For as Taylor comments, while we can conceive of radical choice among strong evaluations, we cannot view our choice of evaluations as radical (on risk that otherwise our evaluations are not strong evaluations). The crux of the issue there is that Sartre sees responsibility as a matter of radical choice and radical choice is entirely a matter of the individual self-assertion. But of course this view runs counter to Taylor’s entire expressivist project (which, recall, was to overcome this bifurcation of individual and the world); the agent of radical choice is a simple “weigher”, a weak evaluator). But the theory of radical choice is even worse off than that for, as Taylor comments, it is incoherent (see pp. 31-32) for it wants to maintain both strong evaluation and radical choice (as Sartre seems to in his example). But strong evaluations, as we have seen, are “judgments” (not choices) in the sense that they involve contrastive articulations of desires-actions complexes and invoke our aspirations to a certain kind of life, being a certain kind of person and this may well, of course, involve a plurality of visions which can be very difficult to adjudicate (choose among). Now both in our articulations/judgments (strong evaluations) as well as in our efforts to adjudicate these we bear responsibility.

Taylor then proceeds to examine this issue of responsibility from another angle. Strong evaluators, he writes, have depth because their articulations/evaluations are bound up with the kind of person they aspire to be/the kind of life they aspire to live; that is, these are bound up with our “personal identity”. Our identity is formed not only in our choices, but especially in our articulations/evaluations. Thus, in answer to the question “who am I as a person”? or “what is my identity?” we don’t point to our choices but to our evaluations which are inseparable from our being “agents”. Without our fundamental evaluations we cease being who we are.

To ask of someone their identity as a person we are referred to their evaluations. Here Taylor writes of a horizon of evaluations (the traditions out of which we articulate our desires) without which we are lost as to our identity. This is also what is so puzzling about Sartre’s notion of radical freedom/choice for such freedom or choice is without the context/horizon of evaluations. This is the autonomy self-defining subjectivity of the Enlightenment/modernity that is radically separated from context (social-cultural order of traditions) and it is what expressivism was intended to overcome. For this autonomy is really a fragmentation of identity, an alienation from the human historical world, from those strong evaluations which identify me as a person.

The pressing question arises how do we come to our evaluations/articulations? Are these not a matter of radical choice? Are we not at all responsible for our evaluations?

Taylor replies that evaluations are not so much chosen as they are an articulation of what is “higher/lower” and more integrated/fulfilling or not. Such articulation while not a

matter of choice (in the usual sense) does invoke our responsibility and here is where Taylor resumes his expressivist thesis.

That is, articulation (in this chapter, the articulation of desires, aspirations, etc.) is not of the simply “given”, rather it is our articulations/interpretations that give “them” (desires) “reality”, “shape” “embodiment”. That is, articulations are not simply descriptions of what is already objectively (out/in) there/here (not like the table which is then described by the word “table”, according to Taylor); on the contrary, articulation is a form-ulation which does not leave the “object” (desire, aspiration, etc.) unchanged but gives it “shape” in a way that we hold to be important/value. Thus, the manner in which we articulate/interpret our desires also (“in part”, here Taylor hesitates) constitutes those desires (our experience of our desires). If we change the articulation/interpretation of the desire, we also change (the shape) of the experience of desire.

As Taylor notes, this is not a causal claim; rather, it is the claim that what we experience depends on, is given shape by, our articulations/interpretations (of our feeling, aspirations, etc.). Thus, the very nature of experience is formed (constituted) by our articulations/interpretations (and these are of course to be understood on the model of expression).

How do we come to change our articulations of our desires/etc.? [Another way of asking this question is to ask “what makes change in personal identity possible?”] Taylor suggests in two ways. (1) We do in living with others; that is, as we are engaged in the world or as we find ourselves embedded in the world. (2) We do so because we find that our articulations clash with the articulations of others (either now in the present, or on reading with those in the past) or else we find ourselves unable to understand others or just unable to understand the way we live and so search for alternate articulations.

Yet these articulation/interpretations are not totally arbitrary or relative to others’ articulations/interpretations; they are instead more or less adequate, truthful, insightful, distorting, delusional, etc. Thus, our evaluations strive to be faithful not to an independent object but rather to what inchoately and inarticulately makes “sense” (in the broad sense of “meaningful”) in living. At the same time, our articulations do not leave the object as it is. In “shaping” it, it makes the object more accessible; it places the object (desire) in the context of our lives. Precisely because these articulations are evaluations they also limit the nature of experience (and subsequent expression of experience). In this sense our evaluations are a judgment on our person. That is, the limits of our experience (as well as expression) are also a judgment on us – that is, we are judged by our moral insight (articulation/interpretations as evaluations). This has nothing to do with radical choice/freedom; it has to do with the manner in which our articulations in fact shape our experience.

Obviously our experience (our articulations and evaluations) are always open to challenge(is not all understanding): always open to elaboration, explication, analysis, and further interpretation. Indeed, I have a responsibility to continue the process of evaluation as long as I live/act and encounter the “world” in everything I do. This is especially so when it comes to what Taylor called our fundamental evaluations – the ones central (deepest) to our identity. For it is often our deepest evaluations that are least well articulated (these are often least clear) even to ourselves. But since this is so, if I do re-evaluating my deepest evaluations it is not a matter of choice but of reformulation, reinterpretation, and re-understanding.

Usually these fundamental evaluations are not articulated because we share (live) them with/in the community/tradition. Since they are “lived”, they need not be articulated. We have here then a tension between “living” and “saying/expressing”. Moreover, note that these deep evaluations cannot be evaluated/reinterpreted in some kind of meta-language (there is no such) nor is there an empirical inquiry (as designativist would claim) hat might help us to decide (obviously, since that inquiry, in turn, would also be articulated in the language of our evaluations). All we can do is converse and reflect on our deepest evaluations and try again and again to articulate them in a manner that would give us insight and understanding into ourselves and the world in which we live. Note that there is no yardstick, as Taylor comments, except to appreciate that any such reevaluation engages my very personal identity, an identity I have always in relationship to others who similarly engage in such re-evaluations.

It is in this context Taylor writes about “radical evaluation” which the self reflecting on the self, on the self’s most fundamental issues (the “deepest” evaluations), and because this self-evaluation is something that we do we are also responsible (even if we fail to do so) for doing so and for the manner in which we do so. Radical evaluation we do in articulating (expressing) what we desire/feel/aspire to etc., always in the context of the world in which we live. Such expression reposes then on the contrastive web of language and hence is part of community and tradition.

Taylor ends his paper with some brief comments on psychology. But these might easily apply to linguistics as well. Thus, any notion of “grammar” that is part of some theory of the brain, or some abstract mental mechanism, is misguided for these accounts/explanations cannot participate in the human agent as a self-interpreting subject – cannot account in principle for the expressivist conception of strong evaluation wherein articulacy is constitutive of, in this chapter, the inner self, our desires, aspirations, etc. This does not mean that linguistics cannot proceed in accord with a formal analysis of language; it does mean this abstractive endeavor must itself be seen as constituted communally in our speech practices, in the formulation and reformulation, in the understanding/interpretation of the meaning (strong evaluations) of these speech practices which inevitably bear our responsibility because it is something we do.

Finally, note here that Taylor relies in this chapter on chapters 9, 10. Thus, he does not explicitly mention the role of language and the question of meaning and the broader question of sense in this chapter. Moreover, he seems only concerned with the expression of “inner life” (desires, aspirations, interests, etc). But, of course, we recall that the expressivist thesis ties this inner life in expression to the world.