Abstract

Educators, philosophers, and commentators in the popular media often assume that students and adult citizens alike should engage in dialogue regarding ethical, social, and political issues, particularly with people who hold different views. Debates about the value of such dialogue tend to focus on the political implications of these exchanges and neglect the ontological and epistemological assumptions that could make sense of why people should talk their way to greater understanding. This focus on the political implications of dialogue also obscures conceptions of personhood that could call into question the relationship between dialogue and understanding. Drawing on conceptual resources available in the work of Charles Taylor, this article argues that ethical insight may best be cultivated when dialogue is interdependent with a quieting of the linguistic, conceptual mind. Taylor insists that articulation is indispensable to moral orientation. However for Taylor, rather than merely identifying or entirely constructing the good, language “grants access” to the good. This suggests that language is a vehicle for sources that exist outside of articulation. Education meant to cultivate students’ capacity for judgment in discussions of ethical, social, and political issues might then be enhanced through practices that reserve space for that which lies outside of language. In particular, educators could cultivate students’ capacity to produce reasons through dialogue not in isolation but in relationship to students’ receptivity to non-verbal insight.