Social Imaginary (Taylor)
The social imaginary, developed most fully in Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), is something broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. It is the way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. It is carried in images, stories, and legends; shared by large groups if not the whole society; and constitutes the common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. The AI amplifier is transforming the social imaginary at a depth and speed that no previous technology has matched.
In the AI Story
The social imaginary is not a theory; it is the background against which theories become intelligible, the pre-theoretical understanding of social life that ordinary people carry as they navigate their daily existence. A modern citizen does not need to have read Locke or Rousseau to inhabit the social imaginary of democratic individualism — the felt sense that each person has rights, that authority derives from consent, that the purpose of government is to serve the people. These are not propositions held before the mind. They are the water one swims in.
The AI amplifier transforms the social imaginary along multiple dimensions simultaneously. The social imaginary of expertise is being reshaped as the machine democratizes competent performance. The social imaginary of authorship is being reshaped as the collaboration between human and machine produces outputs neither could have produced alone. The social imaginary of intelligence itself is being reshaped as the machine's conversational facility makes the computational model of mind feel like common sense rather than a contested philosophical thesis.
These shifts are occurring below the level of conscious reflection, in the pre-theoretical register where the social imaginary operates, and they are producing changes in the felt texture of social life that will take years to become fully visible. The specific anxiety Segal names in The Orange Pill — the feeling that the ground is shifting underfoot, that the categories one has relied upon no longer apply — is the phenomenology of a social imaginary in rapid transformation.
Taylor's framework predicts that shifts in the social imaginary are among the most consequential and least visible transformations a society can undergo. They are consequential because the social imaginary determines what feels legitimate, what feels natural, what feels possible. They are least visible because the social imaginary operates below explicit theorization. The philosophical work of the Orange Pill Cycle can be understood, in Taylor's terms, as a contribution to the articulation of the social imaginary adequate to the AI age — an attempt to make explicit the background understandings within which new practices can be interpreted, evaluated, and directed toward genuinely human goods.
Origin
Taylor developed the concept in Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2004), an expanded version of arguments that had appeared in his essay Modern Social Imaginaries in the journal Public Culture in 2002.
The concept draws on Cornelius Castoriadis's earlier work on the imaginary institution of society while developing it in a distinctively hermeneutic direction. It has been widely taken up in sociology, political theory, and religious studies as a way of describing the pre-theoretical frameworks that shape modern life.
Key Ideas
Pre-theoretical. The social imaginary operates below the level of explicit theory as the background that makes theories intelligible.
Carried in images and stories. The imaginary is transmitted through narratives, legends, and shared images rather than abstract propositions.
Mutual constitution with practice. The imaginary shapes practices, and changing practices reshape the imaginary.
AI transformation. The amplifier is transforming the social imaginary of expertise, authorship, and intelligence itself at unprecedented speed.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2004)
- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007)
- Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (MIT Press, 1987)
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983)