Taylor and the problem of recognizing cultural groups

Abstract

Recognition of cultural groups is an issue that puzzles those involved in the discussions around multiculturalism. Charles Taylor (1994) has done important groundwork in his ‘The politics of recognition’ where different possibilities of multicultural policy-making are discussed. This article concentrates on one social ontological problem that can be found in Taylor’s widely recognized theory. This article proceeds as follows. At first, Taylor's view on recognition is briefly introduced. This view potentially faces the reification problem, which states that recognizing a group that is not really an agent might result in misrecognition and disrespect of individual members of the group. The forms of misrecognition and disrespect range from homogenizing sets of individuals to forced identities anddissonance between individual and collective identities. After the problems of cultural recognition have been made clear, insights from the field of social ontology are brought into the picture. The agency of cultural groups is not self-evident, and in this paper it is argued that Taylor faces a problem when he grants agency to certain kinds of groups that are not really agents. This can be shown using the tools provided by contemporary analytical social ontology. Finally, a tentative way of conceptualizing cultural recognition is offered. The suggestion is that, despite its vagueness, Taylor's position includes elements that enable incorporating a robust social ontological theory into it. If this is done, many of the worries stated in the reification problem might be avoided.

Keywords:

• cultural groups
• group recognition
• multiculturalism
• recognition
• social ontology
• Taylor

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Joel Anderson for his extensive commentary that helped to shape and clarify the argument presented above.

Notes

 1. First published in 1992. This is the main source in which Taylor spells out his version of recognition, and thus this paper concentrates mostly on it out of Taylor's otherwise massive history of publications. Another relevant book, where Taylor discusses recognition (though in a less detailed manner), is The ethics of authenticity (1991).

 2. This claim of reciprocity or mutuality of recognition is commonly made in the Hegelian tradition of recognition theory. In his article ‘Taylor on something called “recognition”' Heikki Ikäheimo (2002) offers a clear formulation of the claim that Taylor uses recognition in this Hegelian sense.

 3. A similar line of critique, but with less emphasis on social ontology, is offered by Brian Barry (2001, 67) who denies that culture is an entity that could have rights. Also Will Kymlicka (1995, 93, 105) wants to conceive cultural recognition as individual recognition. Membership of a cultural group is important only as a background requirement for individual autonomy, which is in turn the main focus of Kymlicka's liberal theorizing.

 4. On Taylor's influence on Margaret Gilbert, one of the leading theorists in analytical social ontology, see her chapter ‘Mutual recognition and some related phenomena’ (Gilbert 2011).

 5. Of the prominent social ontologists, Tuomela (2007), for example, rejects this possibility. So does Bratman (1993), who sees collective intentions as individual intentions suitably arranged.

 6. Taylor's characterizations of a person match largely with Daniel Dennett's (1976, 177–8) earlier and greatly influential description on the conditions of personhood. The first of Dennett's conditions of personhood is rationality. Secondly, persons ought to have intentional states of consciousness. The third requirement is that we must be able to take a certain kind of attitude or stance towards a person. This way of being in relation with a person is conceived at the same time to be constitutive of personhood. In other words, we ought to be able to take stances towards persons in such a way that their personhood is dependent on the stances that others take towards them. Fourthly, a person must be capable of reciprocating. In a broad sense this means that a person should be capable oftreating other persons as persons too. The fifth condition is the ability to communicate verbally or linguistically. The sixth and final condition is a special kind of consciousness that sets persons apart from non-persons. This is called self-consciousness. Persons are then rational, self-conscious, communicative beings that are in person-constituting relations to each other.

 7. This is shown by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (1994, 156).

 8. For more discussion of the concept of culture see, for example, ‘The concept(s) of culture’ (Sewell 2005). He argues that a culture

should be understood as a dialectic of system and practice, as a dimension of social life autonomous from other dimensions both in its logic and in its spatial configuration, and as a system of symbols possessing a real but thin coherence that is continually put at risk in practice and therefore subject to transformation. (Sewell 2005, 88–9)

In this case, being part of a cultural group would be being part of this kind of system of practice.

 9. More on the technical use of ‘we’ can be found, for example, in Tuomela (2003; 2007) and Gilbert (1992).

10. The purposes of individuals might be shared in the sense that all the members of a certain culture strive for similar ends in their private lives but the sharedness in the group sense is stronger. It would demand that the individuals are committed to further certain purposes collectively and knowingly.

11. However, it is questionable whether these groups should be called cultural groups any more.