Sensitivity to Intrinsic Rightness

Charles Taylor’s The Language Animal is a defense of HHH against HLC. That is, he thinks the linguistic perspective developed by Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt is superior to the rationalist and empiricist tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac. HLC “tried to understand language within the confines of the modern representational epistemology made dominant by Descartes.” We have ideas in the mind that represent reality, and knowledge is when the representation in ideas matches the reality. Beliefs “are constructed” and “the issue is whether the construction will be reliable and responsible or indulgent, slapdash, and desultory.” Language gains meaning “by being attached to the things represented via the ‘ideas’ which represent them” (4). Herder, and HHH in general, find this unsatisfactory; Herder charges that Condillac’s account of the origin of language presupposes what it claims to explain. In place of the representative HLC theory, Herder “starts from the intuition that language makes possible a different kind of consciousness” (6).

Taylor proceeds to explain what this consciousness is by developing the claim that language use involves “sensitivity to intrinsic rightness.” What does it mean to identify a shape as a “triangle”? It involves “something like knowing that ‘triangle’ is the right descriptive term for this sort of thing.” Even if I can’t give a reason for thinking that it’s the right description, I operate on the assumption that such a reason can be given. Taylor argues that this implies that “the word can be right or wrong, and that this turns on whether the described entity has certain characteristics. A being who uses descriptive language does so out of a sensitivity to issues of this range.” A parrot might happen on the right word, but we don’t believe that he has sensitivity to the rightness of the word he uses (6-7).

Language use thus stands in contrast to responsiveness to signals as such. Taylor offers a contrary case: “Suppose I train some rats to go through the door with the triangle when this is offered as an alternative to a door with a circle. The rats get to do the right thing. The right signal behavior here is responding to the triangle positively. The rat responds to the triangle door by going through it, we might say, as I respond to the triangle by saying the word” (7). The two acts are not identical: “What makes going through the door the right response to the triangle is that it’s what brings the rats to the cheese in the end-chamber of the maze. The kind of rightness involved here is one which we can define by success in some task, here getting the cheese.” This is not the same rightness as that involved “in aligning a word with the characteristics of some described referent” (7). There is a difference “between responding appropriately in other ways to features of the situation, on the one hand, and actually identifying what these features are, on the other.” Language requires a sense of the intrinsic rightness of the term, while rats in a maze respond to a signal, with “no definition of features, but rather rushing through to reward” (8).

Taylor thinks that this distinction gets lost in enthusiasm about chimp language: “That an animal gives the sign ‘banana’ only in the presence of bananas, or ‘want banana’ only when it desires one, doesn’t by itself establish what is happening. Perhaps we’re dealing with a capacity of the first kind: the animal knows how to move its paws to get bananas, or attention and praise from the trainer. In fact, the sign is aligned with an object with certain features, a curved, tubular, yellow fruit. But this doesn’t show that that’s the point of the exercise; that the animal is responding to this issue in signing” (10).

This is consistent with Herder, at least at a basic level. Language brings us to another kind of consciousness, what Taylor describes as “another dimension,” one that is “semantic” or “linguistic” (11). It is a kind of consciousness, and a dimension of communication and experience that only language users come to.