Revisting Charles Taylor’s 1971 “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man”

The year 2021 marked the 50th anniversary of the initial publication of Charles Taylor’s influential article “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.” The article engaged how the human sciences might make sense of—interpret—meaning’s multiple forms of expression, from language to acts to objects, and then evaluate that analysis. Taylor focused on “experiential”meaning—“for a subject,” “of something,” and existing only “in relation to the meanings of other things”— as distinct from linguistic meaning (1971, 11-12). The opening pages might be mistaken as a contribution solely to political theory or philosophy and the analysis of texts, except for the emphasis on the place of interpretation in the human sciences and on “text-analogues”—meaningfull acts (and, ultimately, objects) treated as if they were texts for analytic purposes—and their potential for manifold meanings.