Brownstein - Conceptuality and Practical Action

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Conceptuality and Practical Action: A Critique of Charles Taylor's

Verstehen Social Theory
Michael Brownstein
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2010 40: 59 originally published online 18
November 2009
DOI: 10.1177/0048393109350841
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Critique of Charles http://pos.sagepub.com
Taylors Verstehen
Social Theory
Michael Brownstein1
Abstract
In their recent debate, Hubert Dreyfus rejects John McDowells claim
that perception is permeated with mindedness and argues instead that
ordinary embodied coping is largely nonconceptual. This argument has
important, yet largely unacknowledged consequences for normative so-
cial theory, which this article demonstrates through a critique of Charles
Taylors Verstehen thesis. If Dreyfus is right that the enemy of expertise
is thought, then Taylor is denied his defense against charges of relativism,
which is that maximizing the interpretive clarity of social practices un-
equivocally makes for better practices. Verstehen social theory, I argue, must
consider both the gains and losses of the attempt to make the meaning of
our practices explicit.
Keywords
hermeneutics, social theory, nonconceptual content, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles
Taylor
Received 2 September 2009

1
New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA
Corresponding Author:
Michael Brownstein, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Heights, Newark, NJ 07102,
USA
Email: msb@njit.edu

60 Philosophy of the Social Sciences 40(1)
Between ethos and logos, practical mastery and verbal mastery, there is
a radical discontinuity.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction
For a long time, philosophers have understood both individual and social
action to be something that flows from reasons. Often by contrast to our more
animal-like passions, reasoning tends to be considered a distinctive human
trait. For philosophers, this has not only been a descriptive point, but often a
normative one as well. Not only do we see ourselves as beings most properly
described by the capacity to reflect on, deliberate about, or become aware
of the reasons that bring us to do what we do, but we also presume that doing
these thingsreflecting, deliberating, achieving self-awarenessare to our
benefit. But is this so? Are all forms of individual and collective action neces-
sarily improved when we reason our way through them? The answer to this
question, I believe, is no. Contrary to a long-standing and problematic preju-
dice in Western culture and philosophy, our lives and our practices are not
always improved when we act self-reflectively or with explicit reasons in
mind. Reasoning, I will argue, has costs. These costs are deeply important
and often ignored by a tradition that too blindly still follows Platos maxim
that the unexamined life is not worth living.
My goal in this article will be to sketch out a sense in which the unexamined
lifeor, more specifically, unreflective actionhas a kind of value that we too
often ignore. I take this point to have general philosophical significance, but
particularly notable consequences for social theorizing, especially in its her-
meneutic incarnation. The latter is premised on the idea that the goal of social
theory is to make the meaning of individual and collective social practices
explicit. This approach to social theory is in turn based on the notion that we
are always ultimately better off having achieved interpretive clarity of our own
actions and practices. I think this view is mistaken. Although we sometimes
benefit from having made the meaning of our practices clear to ourselves, such
that we can act with more deliberate self-awareness, this is not always the case,
and sometimes we are worse off for having acted reflectively.
The article proceeds in three moves. I will begin by discussing Charles
Taylors Verstehen approach to social theory. Taylor has developed one of the
most powerful and celebrated models to date of interpretive social theory.
Although I agree with much of what Taylor says, I believe that he maintains
a problematic faith in the normative value of explicit self-reflection. In short,
Taylor believes in the practical value of maximizing our self-understanding
through interpretive individual and social inquiry. But if maximizing our

Brownstein 61
self-understanding can have deleterious effects in practice, then social theory

must consider both the gains and losses of its own project. This problem is
particularly acute in Taylors case, because he defends his views about social
practice on pragmatic grounds; his approach to social theory should be vali-
dated, he argues, if it makes for better practices. I will not take issue with
this view of validation per se. Rather, granting it, I will argue that Taylors
Verstehen theory, which aims to promote maximal individual and collective
self-understanding, does not in fact always make for better practices.
To show where Taylor goes wrong, I will consider the role of concepts in
ordinary human action. In the second section of the article, I recount a recent
debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell on the topic of noncon-
ceptual content in ordinary experience and action. At stake between Dreyfus
and McDowell is whether intelligible activity necessarily follows from pro-
cesses of conceptual mediation; that is, whether concepts mediate between
purportedly rational agents and the situations to which they respond. While
Dreyfus argues in favor of a phenomenology of largely mindless skills and
activities, McDowell argues for the ineliminability of the conceptualand
hence, mindeddimension of any experience or activity recognizable as
human experience or activity. For Dreyfus, insistence on explaining our
experience and activity in terms of concepts revives what he calls the myth
of the mental, while for McDowell unreflective bodily coping, for human
beings, is always informed by their rationality, meaning that the mental is no
myth at all, but rather an integral feature of human experience as such.
Dreyfus wins his debate with McDowell, in my opinion, and his victory
suggests important lessons for social theorizing. These lessons derive from
the core claim that some ordinary nonconceptual competencies in individual
and social action are harmed by conscious attention or explicit self-reflection.
Hermeneutic social theories, which aim to maximize our self-understanding
through self-reflection, must therefore take note. There is an important and
often unnoticed difference, in other words, between recognizing that some
aspects of ordinary practice deflect conscious attention and explicit self-
reflection (a point that Taylor admirably sees) and recognizing that there are
aspects of ordinary social practice that are better off without our direct,
reflective attention. Borrowing a phrase from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I will
call the latter positively indeterminate social action.
In the third section of the article, then, I develop the concept of positive
indeterminacy by discussing examples from various philosophical and social
scientific literatures which illustrate aspects of practice that may be harmed
by reflective attention. These aspects of individual and collective social prac-
tice are not only indeterminatethat is, resistant to explicit awarenessbut

are positively indeterminate, meaning that their indeterminacy is both a con-

stitutive and normatively valuable feature of the social practices that they are.
A key point I must emphasize at the outset is that I do not believe that reflec-
tion, self-awareness, and deliberation are always bad for us. Such a claim
would be absurd and would fly in the face of endless examples of the benefits
of thoughtful, deliberate, and carefully reasoned action. My claim is only that
self-reflection can undermine actions and practices that we value. That said, I
will not spend much time discussing the benefits of self-reflective action. This
is not because I deny the existence of those benefits. Rather, it is because they
hardly need defending. On the other hand, it is difficult to conceptualize the
intuition that important aspects of our social lives may be harmed by self-
interpretation and rational reflection. But this is what I aim to do.
Charles Taylor and Verstehen Social Theory

In debates about the explanatory nature of social theories, Taylors Verstehen
thesis often represents a bte noire for those who seek to model the social sci-
ences on the hypothetico-deductive model of verification established by the
natural sciences.a This is because Taylor rejects the idea that social phenom-
ena constitute what he calls brute data that could be studied independently
of the meanings social actors understand their practices to have. Instead,
Taylor believes that all forms of social practice are driven by a largely tacit and
opaque background of intersubjective meanings, constitutive distinctions,
and motivating ideals. In sum, these sources of intelligibility in social prac-
tice form what he calls a background of meanings. Taylor develops his
account of the background through a number of related arguments about,
for example, the nature of agency, the development of language, and the ethi-
cal importance of authenticity.
Following Martin Heidegger, Taylor argues that the background of mean-
ings is a necessary and largely tacit feature of all forms of human experience.
Feelings, for example, he argues, are constituted by the background of mean-
ings; feeling shameful because I am overweight is only possible within a
social world where being overweight counts as a fact worthy of shame
(Taylor 1985a, 53). Relevance is constituted by the background of meanings:
it may be true that I have 3,567 hairs on my head, but saying so wouldnt
count as a meaningful self-definition, at least not in a world like ours (Taylor
1991, 36). Social practices are constituted by the background of meanings:
a
For critical assessments of Taylors work, see, for example: Elster (2007), Flledal (1994,
233-47), and Martin (1994, 259-81).

Brownstein 63
while natural phenomenalike cloudsare real, in-the-world entities, Taylor

argues, such that two cultures might understand clouds differently but still be
talking about the same things, social phenomena, like bargaining or voting,
are different. Unlike natural phenomena like clouds, they are constituted by
the meanings social agents give to them.b
The background of meanings is both a necessary feature for the ordinary
functioning of individual agency and social practice and the key concept
underlying Taylors normative arguments about flourishing forms of individ-
ual agency and social practice. Individual and collective action are constituted
by the background, in other words, and both can be improved when we
expressly thematize our backgrounded understanding of what and how things
are. Taylors concept of strong evaluation demonstrates the both concep-
tual and normative dimensions of the background of meanings.
Strong evaluations are concerned with the worth of our purposes, beliefs,
desires, aversions, etc. (Taylor 1985a, 17-18). Taylor distinguishes strong
evaluations from merely instrumental second-order evaluationslike a desire
to have a desire to stop eating too muchbecause strong evaluations are con-
cerned with the worth of our first-order attitudes. Thus, a second-order desire
to stop overeating would not on its own constitute a strong evaluation of my
desires. No pillif one existedwhich might eliminate my desire to overeat,
could fulfill my intention to be a disciplined person, Taylor argues (Taylor
1985a, 22). Only becoming a strong evaluator could do that. Strong evalua-
tors can recognize and choose from different modes of being an agent, rather
than simply dwell in de facto desires or preferences. Taylor cites the ability to
appreciate Bach as an example of being a strong evaluator (Taylor 1985a, 25).
Finding a way of ranking the worth of our desires is a requirement for flour-
ishing forms of human agency (Taylor 1985a, 66). This process of ranking
amounts to making our interpretations clearer; the better the articulation, the
deeper the insight can be, he argues (Taylor 1985a, 63).
Interpretive accounts of social practice work along analogous normative
lines, according to Taylor. Their goal is to clarify and evaluate the worth of the
background of meanings that constitute our social practices. Cultural concep-
tions of rights, for example, ought to be derived from a process of uncovering
and debating about those capacities we deem worthy of respect for human
agents. Debates about rights can then be followed by debates about which
institutions best foster those capacities that rights are meant to respect (Taylor
1985b, 192-93 and 205).
b
Taylor may be characterized therefore as a realist with respect to entities found in the natural
world and an irrealistor better, a social constructionistwith respect to social entities. For a cri-
tique of this aspect of Taylors view, see Rorty (1980: 39-46).

Of course, Taylors account owes us an explanation of what counts as an

improved form of an individual or collective social practice. The challenge
facing Verstehen social theoryin Taylors own estimationis that it simul-
taneously recognizes that social practices are constituted by a background of
shared, intersubjective, and largely linguistic meanings and that these mean-
ings can be right or wrong. The Verstehen social theorist must steer between
what Taylor calls Vulgar Wittgensteinianism (or what he also calls the
Incorrigibility Thesis), on the one hand, and the Natural Sciences Model,
on the other. Vulgar Wittgensteinianism, which Taylor identifies with Peter
Winch, holds that the exclusive goal of social theory is to explain social prac-
tices from social agents points of view, which are, as it were, internal to a given
practice (or language game, in Wittgensteins term). Taylor works in this
vein, hoping, with Winch, to avoid the natural science model. However, because
he worries about both epistemological and normative relativism, Taylor
attempts to add a language of perspicacious contrast capable of making cor-
rigible judgments to vulgar Wittgensteinianism. We must treat social agents
own understanding of their practices as fallible, Taylor claims (Taylor 1981,
200-01). He argues that a good social theory, in the end, must make sense of
agents activitiesin other words, it must see how they came to do what they
didbut it must not be satisfied with recovering their self-descriptions (Taylor
1985b, 116-17). A theoretical account makes the agents doings clearer than
they were to her; it takes account of how the agent sees things and what is poten-
tially wrong with her view (Taylor 1985b, 118). The nature of being agents who
are fundamentally in-the-world, in Heideggers sense, Taylor writes, rules
out absolute, that is, complete and self-evidently incorrigible knowledge,
continuing, but this contact also rules out total error (Taylor 2005, 48).
Taylor defends his claim that the Verstehen approach avoids total error, not
because it offers access in any way to the reality of social practices hidden
beneath appearances, perspectives, or epiphenomena, but rather, because
through the process of articulating the interpretations that constitute those prac-
tices, it renders them more open for reasonable debate and reconstitution. Our
evaluations are articulations of insights which are frequently partial, clouded
and uncertain, Taylor writes, but they are all the more open to challenge
when we reflect (Taylor 1985a, 39). Because social theorists do not have
access to an independent yardstick for measuring the value of social prac-
tices, they must rely instead on the pragmatic idea that a good social theory is
one that enables social agents to do more things and to do them with a deeper
and richer sense of their own aspirations (Taylor 1985b, 147). By making our
interpretations explicit, social theorists enable better debates about those inter-
pretations and comparisons with other interpretations as well. Granted, this

Brownstein 65
view of validation does not move beyond mere interpretation, but Taylor
does not believe that this fact condemns him to a relativistic position.
Although some may worry about the validity of a pragmatic view of truth
like Taylors, my concern focuses on the vagueness of Taylors account of
exactly what comes to be made explicit through the process of articulating the
so-called background of meanings. If he has one, Taylors slogan is that human
beings are self-interpreting animals. He derives this claim principally from
his reading of Hegel and of Heidegger, particularly the latters account of
being-in-the-world. The trouble here is that, for Heidegger, interpreta-
tion is a derivative activity, one of which we are capable because we are
always already engaged understandingly in the world. Heidegger makes
an important distinction between understanding and interpretation, in other
words, and this is a distinction the importance of which Taylor fails to see.
More specifically, Taylor insufficiently recognizes those aspects of human
practical comportmentwhat Heidegger calls understandingwhich are
unavailable in undistorted form to reflective interpretation.
Of course, Taylor is deeply sensitive to the vast and vague background
against which all processes of interpretation and reflection take place. He has
done much to introduce the importance of this concept of the background
into the foundational discourses of social science. However, Taylors insis-
tence that we are better off working toward maximal interpretive clarity of our
actions and practices is made possible on the grounds of a view of human
agency which sees interpretations and semantic meanings all the way down.
On Taylors own measure of successthat successful social theories are
those that enable social agents to do more things and to do them with a deeper
and richer sense of their own aspirationsthis view is problematic.
Conceptuality, Interpretation, and Social Skill

Not unlike Taylor, John McDowell wants to get beyond the Cartesian world-
view according to which human beings see themselves as divided between
freely constructed rational beliefs and the mechanical, law-governed world
of post-Galilean science (Carman 2008). These unhappy alternatives are,
in some sense, McDowells version of vulgar Wittgensteinianism and the natu-
ral sciences model. Following Aristotle, McDowells strategy to solve this
dilemma is to suggest that human beings are by nature rational animals. Or
as he puts it: [we are] beings whose life is pervasively bodily, but of a distinc-
tively rational kind (McDowell 2007a, 370). McDowells central claim is that
we must anchor our view of intelligible action within the unique perspective
of human life, which he calls the space of reasons (McDowell 1981, 153).

Thus, on McDowells view, there is no gap between the spontaneity of reason

and the mechanistic nature of nature. If right, McDowell is thus free to endorse
a scientific, law-governed view of nature while at the same time suggesting
that our place within nature is one within the space of reasons.
At the risk of running roughshod over the subtlety and complexity of
McDowells view, all I want to emphasize here is that his account of the
coping skills which Taylor describes as processes of interpretation hinges on
a claim about the necessity and uniqueness of conceptuality in human action.
McDowells view is that ordinary human perception must be fundamentally
unlike mere animal perception, or the perceptions human infants have,
because the content of ordinary human experiencebeing as it is suffused
with rationalitymust be at least in principle available to conceptual articu-
lation. Conceptuality goes all the way out the impressions of sensibility
themselves, McDowell argues (McDowell 1994, 69). As such, there can be
no content in human experience that could rightly be called subrational on
McDowells view, or in the more common parlance, nonconceptual. This
point is surely reminiscent of Kants view that intuitions without concepts are
blind; just so, McDowell argues that bodily movements without concepts are
mere happenings and are not expressions of agency (McDowell 1994, 89).
As Taylor Carman puts it, when describing McDowells view: I have a con-
cept of a shade of red even if all I can say of it is that shade (Carman 2008).
Similarly, with motor and social skills, I have a concept of the right distance
from which to stand when talking to someone even if all I could say of this
practical concept is about this far. It is crucial for McDowell to show that
these abilitiesto say that shade or this farare activations of a concepta
concept of that shade of red or of this distancebecause McDowells goal
is to overcome the dualism of reason and nature by showing that reason per-
meates the whole of our nature.
While Taylor offers no guarantee about the scope or success of making the
background explicit, McDowell is committed to the view that all perceptual
and experiential content is, at least in principle, available to reflective articu-
lation. Conceptuality, for McDowell, simply means conduciveness to rational
reflection. Now, in what follows, I want to give a brief account of Dreyfus
critique of McDowells view. Dreyfus offers strong reasons to believe that
McDowell is wrong about the pervasiveness of conceptuality in perception
and action. These reasons, I will argue, apply to Taylors account of normative
social theory in an important way. In short: Dreyfus argues that some actions
and practices are transformed negatively when we turn our reflective aware-
ness to them and that this transformation means that those actions and practices
could not have been suffused with conceptuality to start with. If Dreyfus is

Brownstein 67
right, I will argue, then we should not assume, with Taylor, that individual
action and social practice are necessarily made the better when their meaning
is made explicit.
Dreyfus critique of McDowells myth of the mental is grounded in the
claim that the range of intelligent human coping activities is not coexten-
sive with those activities that are available to higher-order reflection without
distortion. Conceptuality, and by implication, the availability of the content of
experience to higher-order reflection, does not, on Dreyfus view, reach out to
the ends of sensibility itself. He makes this point clear by describing an array
of everyday phenomena where consciously attending to our tasks severely
limits our ability to perform them with expertise. Dreyfus core claim is that
if ordinary social and motor skills are transformed by higher-order conceptual
awareness, then we must recognize that those social and motor skills are
ordinarily, in some sense, nonconceptual.
The experiences Dreyfus has in mind are typically illustrated with athletic
examples. Dreyfus exemplar is Chuck Knoblauch, the all-star second base-
man for the New York Yankees who suddenly lost the ability to throw to first
base. Nothing was wrong with Knoblauchs body, but instead, he seemed to
have lost his absorption in everyday coping when, for some reason, he began
to think about the mechanics of making the throw. Knoblauch found that he
could not think about throwing and throw at the same time, at least not with
expertise. Interestingly, Knoblauch had no problem with hard-hit grounders.
But with a softly hit ball, when he had time to think about the task at hand,
Knoblauch couldnt make the play.c Jim Courier, the former number-one
ranked tennis player in the world, captured something of the intuition
Knoblauchs story raises when he said in an interview, the dumber you
are on court, the better youre going to play. Dreyfus concludes that in the
Knoblauch case, and in others like it (when, for example, a musician loses
her feel or an expert chess player ceases to sense the flow of the game),
the enemy of expertise is thought.
The point of Dreyfuss examples are to show that if all intentional content is
permeated with mindedness (i.e., conceptuality), then we could not explain
the deleterious effects of mindedness on expert coping. While Knoblauch
becomes a full-time rational animal with tragic consequences, happily,
Dreyfus writes, the rest of us are only part-time rational animals (Dreyfus
2007, 354). What McDowell overlooks is the fact that the intentional content
of ordinary activity is not simply annexed to language when we reflect on it,
c
When fielding a slowly-hit grounder, Knoblauch would routinely sail the ball 20 or 30 feet
over the first basemans head into the stands, supposedly once hitting then sports broadcaster
Keith Olbermanns mother in the face.

articulate it or interpret it, but is rather transformed by these higher-order

processes.d
If Dreyfus is right about this point in the debateand I believe he is,
although to show so definitively would take much more space than my
related but distinct focus in this article permitsthen we must notice the
striking consequences for Taylors Verstehen thesis. Dreyfus, McDowell, and
Taylor all agree that intelligible action is something like a sensory-motor
embodied orientation in the world that is largely opaque to conscious attention.
The sense in which rationality permeates embodied coping, on McDowells
view, does not imply that the concepts in play in our day to day lives are
abstractable from practical situations, as the traditional model of following
situation-independent rational norms might have it (McDowell 2007b, 339).
This is why it is good enough to count as conceptuality for McDowell if all I
can say of my understanding of proper distance-standing is about this far.
One thing this view shares with Taylor is the idea that practical situation-
dependent intentional content need not actually be articulated in order for
human beings to cope intelligently in the world. But the McDowellian view
that situation-dependent intentional content can always in principle be articu-
lated is also similar to Taylors view that when situation-dependent intentional
content is articulated, we benefit. For both views see nothing potentially
negative about the transformative process of articulation.
Taylor seems to have a conflicted stance toward McDowell. In a review of
Mind and World, Taylor cites his massive agreement with McDowells
thinking. He then goes on to suggest that McDowell smoothes over an impor-
tant difference between pre-conceptual everyday coping and spontaneous
(in the Kantian/McDowellian sense), rational, critical reflection. At the end of
the day, Taylor concludes, McDowell must pay greater attention to the
implicit realm of pre-understanding. This soft critique of McDowell may
make Taylor seem closer to Dreyfus than I have claimed he is. But two points
must be made. First, Taylors view that McDowell overemphasizes the con-
ceptual quality of all human experience says nothing about the normative
d
McDowell might respond by claiming that the sort of mindedness involved in Knoblauch-
like experiences is not the sort of mindedness he has in mind, that the act of overthinking ordi-
nary coping skills is more like the version of detached rationality espoused by the philosophical
tradition against which he, Taylor, and Dreyfus are aligned. On McDowells reading, Knoblauch
fails to successfully perform a practical concept in the same way that you or I might fail to
understand how far to stand from one another when talking. But McDowells response is insuf-
ficient, I think. One can define conceptuality any way one wants, but at some point its breadth
become so wide that the concept of concept does no work. However, if adding conceptuality by
reflecting on our practices has the potential to undermine those practices, then it follows that
some aspect of the content of our experience was nonconceptual to start with.

Brownstein 69
idealwhich Taylor seems to support completelyof conceptualizing and

articulating our experiences. Second, there is a worrying ambiguity in Taylors
use of the term pre-understanding, especially when combined with the
adjective implicit. At issue between Dreyfus and McDowell is whether or
not the content of experience is transformed through reflection or, rather, as
McDowell would have it, that the content of experience is already conceptual
and is merely waiting to be annexed to language. The grammar of the word
pre as Taylor uses it can be read in either of these senses. Pre can mean
simply prior, as inthe (same) content of experience prior to having been
annexed to languageor it can mean something more like proto, as inthe
(substantively different) form of the content of experience before it is trans-
formed by reflection. Taylors use of the adjective implicit strikes me as a
reason to think that he means pre in the first, more McDowellian sense.e
Thus, just as McDowell cannot evaluate the effects of mindful attention
on ordinary action like motor skills, for he believes that any distinctly human
action just is suffused with conceptuality, Taylor is unable to evaluate the
effects of interpretation on social life because he views human experience as
interpretation all the way down.f But this view leaves no room for the study
of those times when interpretive activity itself has the potential to disable the
successful accomplishment of ordinary skillful practices. The essence of Tay-
lors projectto maximize the articulate grip we have on our actions and
practices through individual and collective self-interpretationmust attend
to the potentially self-defeating and distorting effects of interpretation. By
distortion, I do not mean to imply that human beings ordinarily have a
clear view of the meaning of their social practices that is distorted by inter-
pretive activities. The standard against which I am considering the possible
losses, or distortions, because of interpretive activity is Taylors own. It is noth-
ing other than the actual effects on our actions and practices of different ways
of comporting ourselves toward them.
Indeterminacy as a Positive Phenomenon

What we need, then, is a conceptualization of those most mindless aspects of
practical activity that captures the intuition that processes of higher-order
e
I am indebted to Taylor Carman for brining the ambiguity of the grammar of the word pre
to my attention.
f
This phrase was, of course, coined by Dreyfus rather than Taylor. But I believe that Tay-
lors use of the phrase is not consonant with Dreyfus. Where Dreyfus, following Heidegger,
uses the phrase to describe the inevitably hermeneutic nature of the investigation of Dasein,
Taylor uses the phrase to describe an essential feature of human experience itself. Put crudely:
Taylor believes that coping is a matter of interpreting. I do not believe that Dreyfus would agree
with this.

reasoning have the capacity to undermine our ordinary coping skills. We need
a positive conception of mindless action. In the Phenomenology of Percep-
tion, Merleau-Ponty writes, we must recognize the indeterminate as a positive
phenomenon. This point follows on the heels of Merleau-Pontys fascinating
and confusing discussion of having indeterminate vision, which he intro-
duces through a description of optical illusions. When we look at an illusion
like the Mller-Lyer diagramwhich makes two lines of equal distance look
puzzlingly unequalwhat we see is, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, an indetermi-
nate vision, a vision of something or other (Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1963], 6-7).
His point is to critique what he calls the empiricists traditional concept of
sensation, a concept that forgets that perception is concerned with the expres-
sive value of what we see rather than with its logical signification. (That
is, that perception is studied by considering what we ought to see rather than
what we do see, on the empiricist view.) Indeterminacy in perception, Merleau-
Ponty argues, is a positive phenomenon, meaning that it is a necessary feature
of perceiving an intelligible world.
The importance of indeterminacy in ordinary perception is ultimately
only one element of Merleau-Pontys wider views about the limitations of
rational reflection. Just as what we see in the case of optical illusions is not
what, on reflection, we think we ought to see, just so, our body guides us
through the world expertly, Merleau-Ponty argues, but only on condition
that we stop analyzing it and only on the condition that I do not reflect
expressly on it (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 78 and 89). It is this aspect of our
ordinary coping that Dreyfus utilizes against McDowell and that I believe
applies equally to dominant views of hermeneutic social theory like Taylors.
Without forgetting that Taylor admires much in Merleau-Ponty and puts many
of his insights to good use in the construction of Verstehen social theory,
when he insists on the unequivocal value of individual and collective self-
interpretation, Taylor ignores what is perhaps at the very core of Merleau-Pontys
philosophy. Bodily space, Merleau-Ponty writes in a defining statement, is
the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance, the background
of somnolence or reserve of vague power against which the gesture and its
aim stand out (Merleau-Ponty [1965, 115], emphasis added).
In perception, positively indeterminate phenomena are those that require
the maintenance of their own opacity in to function normally. They are the
background or unnoticed periphery needed in order for objects to stand out.
As I will use the term, positively indeterminate social practices are those in
which opacity to rational reflection is both constitutive of the practice as well
as a normatively valuable aspect of it. This sense of opacity is distinct from
three others. It does not mean that positively indeterminate phenomena
are simply random, unintelligible, or unstructured, like the pattern of people

Brownstein 71
walking down Fifth Avenue at a given point in time. Nor does it mean that the
clarity of some given phenomenon is structurally blocked by repressive forces
born in some sense outside the lifeworld, in the Frankfurt School critical
theorists sense. Lastly, positively indeterminate phenomena are different
from those practical experiences depicted by Taylor, who recognizes that
much of our social understanding operates behind our backs, but who also
believes that it is virtually always in our interest to face up to the content of
that understanding reflectively.
This last point highlights my core concern about Taylors view of social
theory. I have found no instances where Taylor speaks negatively or even cau-
tiously about the consequences of transforming ordinary coping into explicit
awareness. He is, of course, highly sensitive to the indeterminacy of ordinary
coping skills, as I have stressed. Whats more, Taylor recognizes that concep-
tual attention transforms ordinary experiences. Indeed, this point follows if
becoming a strong evaluator is a necessary feature of a flourishing life. How-
ever, Taylors recognition of the fact that explicitness transforms the content
of ordinary indeterminate coping does not mean that he accepts or recognizes
the positivity of indeterminate ordinary coping. Taylors normative ideal in
both his theory of individual agency and his conception of the Geisteswissen-
schaften indicates that he thinks this transformation is always desirable.
Crucially, it is not the case that the phenomenon of positive indeterminacy
applies only to motor skills like throwing a ball and to basic perceptual expe-
riences like focusing on an object (rather than the light which illuminates it).
Across many domains of social action, ranging all the way up from basic
motor skills to collective cultural practices, there are costs to rational reflec-
tion. This is a range of kinds of activities which mirrors the scope of practices
that fall under the purview of Taylors Verstehen thesis. And, in each of these
cases, self-reflection and deliberation have the potential to act in the way that
Heidegger characterizes interpretation, which, as he says, takes the first cut
out of ordinary experience (Heidegger 1962, 196-97).
What first becomes questionable when we consider examples of posi-
tively indeterminate phenomena are Taylors claims about the unequivocal
value of becoming a strong evaluator for individual agency and decision
making. Recent empirical studies of decision making, for example, highlight
the potential harms involved with focusing on our reasons for making the
choices weve made. Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler highlight these
findings in an article aptly titled, Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can
Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions. There, they discuss a
number of studies which ask subjects to make choicesbetween art posters or
varieties of jam, for exampleunder essentially two different conditions: one
test group is asked to analyze their reasons for choosing and the other is not.

The results of studies like these predictably show that analyzing reasons
including, as Taylor might put it, considerations about the worth of our
preferencesreduces the quality of our decisions. It does so in two ways.
First, we more often regret the choices we have madefor one poster versus
anotherunder the introspection condition (Wilson and Schooler 1991, 185).
Put simply, according to Wilson and Schooler, we are less satisfied with the
choices we make when our attitude shifts from engagement to reflection.
Second, Wilson and Schooler also demonstrate that choices made in the reflec-
tive attitude correlate less well to the opinions of experts. We are much more
likely to rank varieties of jam, for example, in the order of quality determined
by Gourmet magazine when we are not asked to analyze our reasons for
ranking the jams as we have (Wilson and Schooler 1991, 185).
In light of studies like these, Taylors defense against charges of relativism
that were better off when we become strong evaluators and that being better
off is a good criterion of truthful mediation between practicesbegins to
appear more like a free-standing value than any essential claim about the
nature of agency or social practice. The fact that positive indeterminacy does
not merely describe an important element of motor and perceptual skill, but
also describes a key feature of decision making, puts the onus on Taylor
to defend, rather than simply state, the blanket value of rational reflection.
Michael Shapiro makes just this point about Taylor, arguing that his account
of strong evaluation ultimately judges de facto preferences as unworthy of
human agents, a claim that stems not from any conceptual point about human
agency as such, but rather, from an idiosyncratic moral tradition with deep
roots in Kantian ethics and Christian self-denial (Shapiro 1986, 315). Indeed,
when Taylor casually cites the ability to appreciate Bach as a mark of the
strong evaluator, he seems to confirm Shapiros worry.
Not only do the quality of our decisions sometimes improve when we resist the
reflective attitude, but we seem to have more of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
calls optimal experiences as well. Csikszentmihalyis description of opti-
mal experiences in his book Flow (1990) comes to the opposite conclusion to
Taylor regarding the sources of personal fulfillment. I take the sources of
personal fulfillment to be perhaps one wrung further up the ladder from
motor skill to decision making to what Taylor would call our motivational
ideals, all of which I am arguing have the potential to be positively indeter-
minate. Where Taylor focuses on strong evaluations and ranking the worth of
ones desires, Csikszentmihalyi focuses on self-forgetful involvement in ones
tasks. Csikszentmihalyi asked subjects to wear an electronic paging device
and to record how they felt and what they were thinking whenever the pager
signaled. The pager was activated about eight times a day at random intervals.
His account of flow experiences is the result of this research. The conclu-
sion of Csikszentmihalyis study is that subjects report being most fulfilled

Brownstein 73
when their concentration is so intense that self-consciousness disappears, their

sense of time becomes distorted, and their experiences take on an autotelic
quality (i.e., their actions are ends in themselves) (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 71).g
In the phenomenology of personal fulfillment, the positive indeterminacy of
flow experiences attests to the problematic nature of Taylors general norma-
tive orientation.
We can move further up the ladder toward more complex forms of social
interaction and find similar reasons to be distrustful of Taylors blind faith in
the value of interpretive reflection. For example, Taylor Carman sets out to
supplement Dreyfus athletic examples with a discussion of what he calls
the art of the conversation (Carman 2008). It is obvious that having a con-
versation requires us to utilize skills of which we are largely unaware,
Carman points out. We must recognize when to start and stop talking, when
to be serious or to make a joke, when to make eye contact, and when we are
making too much eye contact. Carman suggests, however, that it is precisely
when we reflect on these skills that we cease to perform them successfully.
The engaged attitude keeps us in the conversation, as he puts it, precisely
by steering us away from our own self-reflections.h What this suggests is
that some aspects of our engaged conversational skills must remain neces-
sarily opaque to us. Sometimes we mustas Pierre Bourdieu would put
itmisrecognize what we are doing.i Surely it is sometimes valuable in a
g
David Velleman develops Csikszentmihalyis account of flow experiences in an essay aptly
titled The Way of the Wanton. Velleman suggests that achieving self-forgetful engaged states, like
those described by Csikszentmihalyi, is an essential step in the process of becoming a fully human
agent Velleman (2007). Vellemans goal is to reconcile Harry Frankfurts fears of the wanton per-
son (the one who, lacking higher-order self-evaluations, is a helpless bystander to her desires) with
Csikszentmihalyis account of optimal experiences. To do so, Velleman puts forward the notion of
higher wantonness. Whats important is the fact that Velleman sees a need to pull off this reconcili-
ation, more than whether or not the Taoist-inspired higher wantonness does so. Vellemans interest
in saving second-order reflection as one of the conditions of human agency seems to me to be moti-
vated by something like a recognition of positively indeterminate phenomena.
h
Might we make the same point about amorous relationships, against what Taylor says when
he claims that when we disambiguate our feelings for another, and realize why we love them,
we will have inevitably gained (Taylor 1985a, 70)? I surely agree that we often gain from disam-
biguating our feelings for another. But inevitably?
i
At the heart of social practices, according to Bourdieu, are stakes of the game to which
engaged social actors must be unconsciously attuned. For example, being a philosopher requires
a practical understanding of the dispositions, tastes, manners of speaking, etc. valued by the
philosophical field. According to Bourdieu, having this practical understanding requires mis-
recognizing it. To misrecognize something is different from failing to recognize it. Misrecog-
nition is Bourdieus way of showing that successfully engaged social actors must perceive the
relevant stakes that structure a given social field without reflective awareness that they are doing
so. It is because agents never know completely what they are doing that what they do has more
sense than they know, he writes (Bourdieu 1990, 69). Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieus book
about the skhol, or scholastic attitude, describes misrecognition at work in academia, where
success, he believes, requires being blind to having an interest in success (Bourdieu 2000, 37).
His point, much like mine, is to demonstrate how opacity is a positive element of engaged social
practice (Bourdieu 1990, 37).
conversation to stop and ask oneself, am I being a good listener? but we

must also see that we have stopped listening when we step back from the
conversation to ask ourselves this question.
Having a conversation is not only a social skill, but also a normatively
attractive social practice. A backgrounded understanding of why we ought to
endeavor to have good conversations is just the kind of ascription of value
that Taylors version of Verstehen social theory seeks to examine, interpret,
and articulate. At times, of course, Taylors prescription is right. Conversa-
tions form the basis of the kind of Gadamerian ethics that motivate much of
Taylors most appealing normative work. (Indeed, Taylors language of per-
spicacious contrast directly draws from Gadamers concept of the fusion of
horizons.) But we must not let the value of a conversational ethics over-
shadow the basic phenomenological point that reflecting on a conversation
may create a meaningful departure from having a conversation. Taylors version
of Gadamerian ethics is not universal, pragmatically speaking.j Thinking that
it is blurs the line between engagement and reflection, a line which, follow-
ing Taylors own prompt to consider social theories in light of their effects on
practice, I have drawn along pragmatic lines.
Even with very abstract and high-level cases of motivating ideals and cul-
tural values, of the sort Taylor addresses in Sources of the Self, the question of
positive indeterminacy arises. Taylors default position is that Verstehen
theory aids civic debates by helping us to locate and define our backgrounded
cultural ideals and to own up to them more authentically. This position is
admirable for its ability to navigate between the unhappy alternatives of vulgar
Wittgensteinianism and the natural sciences model. But even in the most
abstract and high-level social caseswhere the absence of rational discourse
and critical self-examination has obviously disastrous consequencesit is
not at all clear that reflective self-interpretation represents a universal nor-
mative good. Here too there can be costs to the kind of hermeneutic
self-reflection Taylor prescribes.
j
Taylor supports the Gadamerian notion that hermeneutic understanding is the universal
foundation for all intelligible activity and that working to understand our own hermeneutic
embeddedness in the world is a necessary feature for genuine social and political discourse.
Gadamers place in this discussion demands an article all to itself, and not only for this reason.
McDowell repeatedly cites Gadamer as an ally against the enlightenment ideal of a detached
universal reason. Interestingly, Dreyfus uses McDowells support for Gadamer as a point of
contrast between Merleau-Ponty and himself, on the one hand, and McDowell and Gadamer, on
the other. Much of this contrast turns on Gadamers rather un-Heideggerian view of language,
which is that mans relation to the world is absolutely and fundamentally verbal in nature, and
hence intelligible (Gadamer 2000 [1975], 475-76). Taylors general framework of interpretive
social understanding surely falls on the near side of any contrast involving Gadamers concept of
universal hermeneutic understanding, which is why I have tried to show that Dreyfus critiques
of McDowelland the lessons about social action they provideapply in important ways to
Taylors views of social theory.

Brownstein 75
Much of his most recent work addresses conflicts between secularism and
religious ideals in modern liberal states. I will not attempt to evaluate Taylors
conception of secularism here, nor its place in his understanding of liberal
political theory. It is no coincidence, however, that Taylors interlocutors
vis--vis religion are philosophers like John Rawls and Jrgen Habermas
thinkers who are interested in defining the proper place for faith in political
debates and public reasoningwhereas Dreyfus interlocutor vis--vis reli-
gion is Sren Kierkegaard. The latter is well-known for arguing that as our
reflective grasp of religious faith improves, our ability to be religious declines.
Certainly, Kierkegaards views of religious faith are contestable, and much
more would need to be said to explicate and evaluate them. But my interest
is not in determining whether Kierkegaard is right (or wrong) about religious
faith. My point is that a view like Kierkegaards cannot even enter the fray if
the discussion unfolds on Taylors terms. For to believe that raising ones
individual or cultural hermeneutic self-awareness is always a good thing is eo
ipso to deny the Kierkegaardian conception of faith, against which reflective
self-awareness is at odds.
For just as Dreyfus claim against McDowell is that one could not recog-
nize the deleterious effects of explicit self-reflection on our motor skills if
those skills were suffused with conceptuality anyway, I am saying that, in
the case of a high-level cultural practice like religious observance, one could
not give fair consideration to the potentially deleterious effects of explicit
self-reflection, as someone like Kierkegaard sees them, if that practice was
motivated by interpretive ideals anyway. Indeed, one would have no reason
to consider even the mere possibility that self-reflection could undermine
faith if one conceives of religious ideals as interpretations merely waiting to
be annexed to language. And this is just how Taylor describes religious
ideals. Consider his description of the agenda for modern man, derived from
his sense of an earlier religious ideal:
But the important thing to focus on for our purposes is that this notion
of ordinary life, of fulfilling ones needs, describes an ideal, even a dif-
ficult one. It is not just a matter of following impulse. Rather it requires
that we live our life in a certain spirit, a discernment which requires that
we fight free of the presumptuous illusions that sinful man is prone to.
We have to live our ordinary life, while seeing our needs and desires
in a certain light, as God-given, and hence free both from the aura of
idolatry and the obsessive involvement of libertinism. The sanctified
ordinary life is a spiritual condition, involving discipline and discern-

ment. In using the things of the world, it is also asserting the supremacy
of the spirit. (Taylor 1985b, 265)
Taylor goes on to insist in the next paragraph that the modern conception of
fulfilling my nature grows out of and maintains something important about
this romantic religious ideal. It is the fact that being in touch with our nature
is an achievement, a sign of having extricated ourselves from dwelling in
mere desire and having elevated our desires to reasoned ones.
To be clear, I am not arguing that Taylors view of faith is wrong. All I
am suggesting is that Taylors view of faith is based on the claim that an
interpretive ideal (or set of ideals) motivates our religious commitments, that
this view makes faith out to be nothing more than the articulate version of
those interpretations, and that the possibility of faith being harmed by the
process of articulating our ideals and meanings is fundamentally at odds with
this view. This is, I believe, Dreyfus critique of McDowell writ large. And
my concern is that it gives us no reason to ask when and why reflection might
undermine our practices. This should worry Taylor, who is centrally con-
cerned with the effects, in practice, of doing social theory.
Conclusion
Is there, however, a problematic gap in my argument between what may be
convincing claims about the potentially deleterious effects of explicit self-
awareness on motor skills and the effects of social theorizing on social
practice? While it may be difficult to think and throw at the same time, as
Chuck Knoblauchs story suggests, surely one can engage in socially mean-
ingful practices while reflecting on them. The practice of writing, as one
reviewer of this article self-consciously noted, is simultaneously reflective
and engaged.
The same concern put slightly differently is that the negative effects
of reflection are perhaps limited to the moment of performance, as when
Knoblauch throws the ball or when one engages in a conversation. But do
cases like these, which illustrate the costs of self-reflection at the moment of
engagement, have bearing on the work of social theory? What can be said, if
anything, about the effects of articulating the interpretations, ideals, or mean-
ings that are said to motivate our social practices at a distance from those
practices, from the position of the disengaged theorist?
These related concerns elucidate exactly why I borrowed the concept of
positive indeterminacy from Merleau-Ponty. It is clear that we can engage in
meaningful social practices while reflecting on them, but what is not clear is

Brownstein 77
that we always can do so. This not always has two interpretations, one
stronger and one weaker. The weaker, relatively uncontroversial interpreta-
tion is that there are some actions and practices in ordinary life that resist our
reflective tendencies. It is hard to deny that self-reflection has the potential to
take us out of the flow of a chess match, a music performance, or a soccer
game. So surely there are some cases when we cannot engage in meaningful
social practice and also reflect on it. This is, in my vocabulary, the fact of
indeterminacy in social practice. There are things that we do which are indeter-
minate, unarticulated, or unreflective, and reflecting on these kinds of activities
changes them.
The stronger, controversial claimwhich is the one I have madeis that
there are some cases of social practice that are positively indeterminate,
which I have defined as a kind of indeterminacy which is both a necessary
and normatively valuable feature of a given practice. Thus, while indetermi-
nate practices resist our reflective tendencies for better or worse, positively
indeterminate practices resist our reflective tendencies for the better. Not
only are there cases where we cannot successfully act and reflect on our
actions simultaneously, but there are cases where we are better off not trying,
where to add reflection is to undermine the goal of the practice itself. I have
argued that some aspects of decision-making processes (especially those
involving decisions about our own preferences), the flow experiences
described by Csikszentmihalyi, engaged conversations, and perhaps even
religious faith, fall under this category. I have not tried to argue that these
practices never benefit from deliberation or self-reflection; I have only
attempted to open space for the consideration that they may be harmed by it.
And this is why the story about throwing baseballs and the like is in fact
germane to the work of social theory. For to say that reflection is often a good
thing is different from saying that we ought to maximize the reflective clarity
of all of our practices. I endorse the former viewthat reflection is often a
good thingbut reject the latterthat we ought to maximize the reflective
clarity of all of our practices. To endeavor to maximize the interpretive or
conceptual grip we have on all of what we are doing is dangerously close to
suggesting that we should always act as reflectively as possible, as often as
possible. The existence of positively indeterminate practices shows why we
should not do this. This distinction is mirrored by Taylors uneasy relation-
ship to the so-called epistemological tradition. He is critical of this traditions
conceit that the most fundamental capacity of human beings is to know
things, that mindedness, in other words, is the essential description of the
human condition. But Taylor is insufficiently critical of the concept of mind-
fulness, that we are always better off having undergone processes of

individual and collective self-interpretation. In other words, Taylor does well

to take the philosophical traditions enthrallment with the epistemological
traditions conception of pervasively minded agents to task. But he fails to
extend the same critical insight to the traditions enthrallment with the idea
that human beings can and always ought to be pervasively mindful agents.
Thus, it may be right to limit my claim about the costs of reflection to the
moment of engaged action (i.e., a critique of the ideal of being persistently
mindful), but this is more of a problem for Taylor than for me. Verstehen
social theory, at least on Taylors view of it, is founded on a sense of continu-
ity between what flourishing individuals do and what scholarly theorists in
the human sciences do. They both articulate the background of meanings with
which they presumably ascribe worth to their own individual and cultural
practices, and they putatively benefit from doing so. I have not argued for or
against this view of social theorists as more or less equivalent to ordinary
social actors per se; rather, I am suggesting that if it is correct, then social
theory faces the problem of positive indeterminacy just as ordinary actors do.
Recognizing the relationship between positive indeterminacy and social
theory creates new and perhaps surprising ways of looking at old problems.
Social science literature is rife, for example, with expositions of problematic
implicit attitudes and stereotypes. At the extreme end, John Bargh and Tanya
Chartrand have recently demonstrated that showing people images of African
American males causes them to act more aggressively in cooperation games
(Bargh and Chartrand 1999, 467). Surely, in this case, we would be better
off if we could recognize, articulate, and resist the prejudiced assessments of
others that are implicit in our attitudes. But to take this as obviously true is not
to say that acting unreflectivelyon the basis of gut instincts or implicit
attitudesis always bad and that acting reflectively is always good. Preju-
dices are what Bargh calls maladaptive tendencies; they have evolved for
good reasons but can become problematic. Some of those good reasons con-
tinue to be operative in our lives. Prejudices are part of the processes that
enable us to code an environment as safe or not, without ever having to think
about it. (And thinking about whether an environment is safe or not is usu-
ally a sub-par way of assessing it.k) It is wrong to think that we would do
better if we simply thought our way through our circumstances, making
k
See, for example, de Becker (1999). De Becker, a former law-enforcement official, devel-
ops strategies for determining when one is a dangerous situation. The strategies de Becker rec-
ommends are largely aimed at learning how to trust our instincts and senses and learning how to
ignore our conscious rationalizations.

Brownstein 79
conscious evaluations as we go. Indeed, there are documented cases of

patients suffering from psychological syndromes or traumas who are con-
demned to do just this.l
Thus, as Gerd Gigerenzer puts it, the real question is not if but when we
can trust our guts (Gigerenzer 2007, 17). My essential concern about Taylor
is that this question can see no daylight on his construal of social theory. By
contrast, if positive indeterminacy in practice is recognized as a real phenom-
enon, then were in the valuable position as social theorists of considering the
effects of different kinds of reflection in practice. What ways of facing up to
our prejudices happily undermines them, when it is to our benefit to do so?
What ways of reflecting on our practices enables us to utilize our gut instincts
intelligently, without having to reflect on them? The same questions apply to
motor skills. I have been asked several times, after presenting versions of this
article at conferences, but what about coaching? Chuck Knoblauch aside,
skilled athletes benefit all the time from reflectively breaking down their swing,
their mechanics, their motion, etc. with their coaches. This is why coaches
often take videos of players. Following the metaphor, then, while we may
never be able to have a Gods-eye view of the world, as Taylor would say,
perhaps we can have and enjoy a coachs-eye view of ourselves. But in this
case too, there are different ideas about how and when to coach. Good
coaches are mindful of the problem of overthinking. They recognize the limi-
tations of their own role. They have well-developed strategies for integrating
reflective, deliberate attention with engaged and often mindless activity.
Heedlessly taking a coachs view of ourselves at all times would be unpro-
ductive at best and disastrous at worst.
This point about coaching enables me to emphasize that my argument is
not that we should simply draw artificial lines around those practices that are
ripe for reflection and those that arent. Instead, just as good coaches are
attuned to the costs and benefits of taking on the coachs attitude, we need
normative social theories that are better equipped to recognize and evalu-
ate the costs and benefits of deliberate and reflective activities and to integrate
that recognition into their theoretical self-understanding, and most importantly,
into their prescriptions for better practices. Doing so requires studying the
practical transformation, as Dreyfus puts it, of the largely self-sufficient
ground-floor level of everyday coping into the upper floors of higher-level
awareness (Dreyfus 2005, 48). Of course, I have provided no yardstickto
borrow one of Taylors termsagainst which to measure and differentiate
l
See, for example, Wilson (2002, 23-29).

the salutary and/or deleterious effects of this transformation. I do not know if

one can be found. But surely the first step to understanding the effects of this
transformation is to recognize its existence.
In service of his argument that theory is a kind of practice, Taylor refers to
maps as a good metaphor for the pragmatic nature of social theory: the map
becomes useless, indeed ceases to be a map in any meaningful sense for me,
he writes, unless I can use it to help me get around (Taylor 2005, 37). Maps
are indeed a useful metaphor, but perhaps in a way that Taylor has not quite
recognized. The very essence of a map is to exclude some features of a given
in order terrain to highlight others. The history of global map projections is the
history of comparative losses and gains. Depending on what one wants to
accomplish, she should choose a map that accurately represents proportion at
the expense of relative distance or tactile accuracy at the expense of size, etc.
As Howard Veregin, the director of geographic information systems at Rand
McNally, puts it: maps lie on purpose in order to tell the truth. (quoted in
Weinberger [2007, 156])
Certainly, I am not recommending that normative social theories ought to
act like maps and tell beneficial lies. I am saying, rather, that if normative
social theories have pretensions to improve the practices the meaning of
which they interpret, articulate, and clarify, then social theories must face up
to the kinds of effects processes of interpretation, articulation, and clarifica-
tion have in practice. This means recognizing the way that reasoning and
self-reflection can sometimes act like maps, narrowing down, distorting, and
even undermining what we do. Verstehen social theory in particular, then,
would be more able to remember William Jamess observation, that
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is

habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the
drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and
the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional
deliberation. (James 1961, 156)
For it can only be understood as a failure of Taylors project on his own lights
if Verstehen social theory succumbs to a picture of human life that James
might in his sense consider miserable.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship
and/or publication of this article.

Brownstein 81
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this
article.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Alison Wylie, James Bohman, Paul Roth, Mark Risjord, Hubert
Dreyfus, John Christman, Taylor Carman, and Mary Alessandri for offering me
invaluable comments on this article. I also received many helpful comments from
participants of the 11th Annual Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable, the 8th
Annual Graduate Student Conference at the New School for Social Research, the St.
Johns University Philosophy Department Faculty Colloquium, and the Penn State
University Philosophy Departments Weekly Speaker Series.
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Bio
Michael Brownstein is assistant professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Insti-
tute of Technology. His work focuses on unreflective behavior and tacit forms of
understanding. He is currently writing a series of articles exploring conceptions of
unreflective behavior at work in contemporary philosophy of action (in theories of
agency, moral evaluation, and intention); in phenomenology (in accounts of engaged
coping, embodied know-how, motor intentionality, nonconceptual content, and phro-
nesis); in psychology and social psychology (in studies of implicit processing, automatic
behavior, intuitive and holistic judgment, subliminal processing, and nonconscious
processing); and in the popular press (in writings about snap judgments, gut feelings,
and intuition). He has published articles on the relevance of unreflective behavior to
many domains of social practice, including political discourse, practical reasoning,
and the Internet.

Brownstein - Conceptuality and Practical Action

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Philosophy of the Social

Conceptuality and Practical Action: A Critique of Charles Taylor's

The online version of this article can be found at:

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Received 2 September 2009

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Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

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self-understanding can have deleterious effects in practice, then social theory

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are positively indeterminate, meaning that their indeterminacy is both a con-

Charles Taylor and Verstehen Social Theory

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while natural phenomenalike cloudsare real, in-the-world entities, Taylor

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Of course, Taylors account owes us an explanation of what counts as an

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Conceptuality, Interpretation, and Social Skill

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Thus, on McDowells view, there is no gap between the spontaneity of reason

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articulate it or interpret it, but is rather transformed by these higher-order

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idealwhich Taylor seems to support completelyof conceptualizing and

Indeterminacy as a Positive Phenomenon

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when their concentration is so intense that self-consciousness disappears, their

conversation to stop and ask oneself, am I being a good listener? but we

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individual and collective self-interpretation. In other words, Taylor does well

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conscious evaluations as we go. Indeed, there are documented cases of

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the salutary and/or deleterious effects of this transformation. I do not know if

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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