So expression can form a mode of coming-to-awareness; it can function as an act of exploration, even of discernment. Charles Taylor builds on such ideas in his argument for language’s ‘human expressive-constitutive power’. His account of how language is constitutive, not so much of the world as of how human beings—the ‘self-interpreting animal’, as he calls us—relate to it, is one of the best I have read of how language matters to being human. He links the self’s meaning-allocating activity—how the kind of mental universe one inhabits is chosen and constituted—with use of language. Note the presence of the attitudinal realm: ‘the way things have significance’. It is crucial for grasping Taylor’s scheme. Way, shape: the argument depends on these terms:More even than that, more than that our articulations create the attitudinal shapes of what matters, we use these articulations to secure and make intimate and animated those feelings, to make them real in and for us, to make them more ingrained, more lived, to make them signify in our lives, to become firmer sources of meaning; through articulation, we make them more central and more explicit. We grasp and position (‘place’) them through language, so centring our lives upon or about or through them: this is a kind of ‘realizing’.