ABSTRACT
Drawing primarily from The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, this chapter provides a synopsis of Charles Taylor’s philosophy of language. It explicates what he calls the HHH (Hamann, Herder, Humboldt) approach and explains the ways in which he finds it superior to the earlier HLC (Hobbes, Locke, Condillac) approach to language. The layers of holism in the HHH approach are identified and we see that Taylor positions language as one among several symbolic forms. This chapter discusses the centrality of conversation as the model for his understanding of language. It identifies three ways in which language informs Taylor’s philosophical anthropology: his views of the dialogical self, of humans as self-interpreting animals, and of the narrative structure of self-interpretations.
