Document Type : پژوهشی
Authors
1
Assistant Professor, Department of Islamic Studies, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran
2
Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Arak University, Arak, Iran
Abstract
Abstract
The relationship between thought and language in Herder’s philosophy is usually formulated either as a claim concerning the dependence of thought on language or presented as a preliminary stage in the history of linguistic relativity and modern hermeneutics. Despite their historical significance, both approaches fail to provide a precise account of the reciprocal mechanism that Herder establishes among the faculty of reflection, signification, memory, tradition, and cultivation, and they marginalize the educational implications of this mechanism. The main question is how the reciprocal relationship between thought and language in Herder’s philosophy can be reconstructed as a formative model and what conception of learning, curriculum, and education this model provides. This study was conducted through conceptual-historical analysis and normative reconstruction, based on a reading of Herder’s works.
The findings show that Herder neither maintains the complete priority of thought over language nor regards language as a prison of the mind. At the first level, the human reflective capacity, or “reflective awareness” (Besonnenheit), makes possible the recognition of a salient feature and the formation of the first sign; at the second level, established language recursively organizes the manner of attention, memory, and conceptualization; and at the third level, interaction among languages, texts, and traditions cultivates the capacity for translation and self-critique. This structure may be called “formative linguisticality,” and its educational form may be formulated as “hermeneutic-formative education.”
Accordingly, the aim of education is not merely the transmission of information or linguistic skills, but the development of learners’ “semantic agency,” a capacity that is formulated in this study in five components: naming, differentiation, reinterpretation, translation, and the critique of meaning. The theoretical and practical implications of this reconstruction include the design of a language-aware curriculum across all subjects, the planned use of learners’ multilingual repertoires, linking concept teaching with embodied and historical experience, strengthening interpretive dialogue, reconsidering assessment in multilingual environments, and educating teachers who are sensitive to language ideologies and relations of power. The findings of the study show that Herder can provide a theoretical mediation between the two poles of abstract cognitive universalism and linguistic determinism and offer contemporary philosophy of education a model of human development that is simultaneously contextual, dialogical, multilingual, and normative.
Synopsis
This study reconstructs the reciprocal relationship between thought and language in Johann Gottfried Herder’s philosophy and examines its implications for curriculum, multilingual education, and teacher preparation. Existing interpretations often emphasize the dependence of thought on language or Herder’s historical contribution to linguistic relativity and hermeneutics. They give less systematic attention to the formative mechanism connecting reflection, signs, memory, tradition, and human cultivation. The study asks how this mechanism can be reconstructed as a model of education that explains the development of understanding while clarifying its normative orientation.
The research combines conceptual and historical analysis, comparative hermeneutic reading, and normative reconstruction. Its primary source is the Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), read alongside Herder’s historical, anthropological, and aesthetic writings. Key concepts, including Besonnenheit, Merkmal, Bildung, and Humanität, are interpreted within their historical contexts. Contemporary scholarship on translanguaging, classroom dialogue, and linguistically responsive teaching informs the examination of educational implications. Throughout, historical interpretation is distinguished from the authors’ constructive proposals. The terms ‘formative linguisticality,’ ‘semantic agency,’ and ‘hermeneutic-formative education’ designate concepts developed in this study and should not be attributed directly to Herder.
The analysis identifies a recursive formative relationship operating at three interconnected levels. First, Besonnenheit, understood as reflective awareness, enables human beings to distinguish a salient feature (Merkmal) within sensory experience, retain it, and recognize it as a sign. This elementary capacity for attention and discrimination makes linguistic articulation possible without presupposing an already developed system of conceptual thought. Second, historically established language reorganizes attention, memory, conceptualization, and judgment. Public signs preserve experience, enable comparison, and make accumulated knowledge available across generations. Third, interpretation, literary creation, translation, and encounters among languages keep inherited meanings open to revision. Language thus participates in the formation of thought while remaining susceptible to reflective transformation. The resulting model of formative linguisticality explains linguistic mediation without reducing cognition to linguistic determinism.
This account connects embodied perception with the historical and affective dimensions of understanding. Linguistic traditions transmit ways of attending to the world, narrating experience, and recognizing others. Poetry and narrative contribute to the cultivation of imagination and affective discrimination, while translation reveals the limits of familiar expressions and extends interpretive possibilities. Bildung is accordingly understood as the cultivation of human capacities through engagement with inherited meanings; Humanität provides the normative horizon within which that cultivation is evaluated in relation to human dignity and shared life.
On this basis, the study formulates hermeneutic-formative education as guided participation in worlds of meaning. Its central aim is semantic agency: the learner’s capacity to participate consciously and with reasons in the formation, reconstruction, and evaluation of meaning. This capacity comprises five interconnected activities: naming experience, making conceptual distinctions, reinterpreting meanings, translating across languages or representational forms, and critically examining meanings and their presuppositions. Learning therefore requires opportunities to connect expressions with experience, justify conceptual distinctions, and revise interpretations. Teachers mediate access to disciplinary knowledge while enabling learners to question and reconstruct the language through which that knowledge becomes intelligible.
Conclusion
The reconstruction yields a language-aware conception of curriculum across subject areas. Teaching should make disciplinary vocabulary, genres, and forms of reasoning explicit and connect formal concepts with observation, comparison, and lived experience. Planned translanguaging allows learners to draw on their full linguistic repertoires while developing access to academic and publicly shared forms of discourse. Interpretive dialogue, comparison of translations, and movement among verbal, visual, and symbolic representations provide contexts for exercising semantic agency. Assessment should distinguish conceptual understanding and reasoning from proficiency in the dominant language, using varied forms of expression where appropriate and explicit linguistic criteria when language production is itself an educational objective.
The study’s distinctive contribution is a philosophical criterion for evaluating language-sensitive educational practices. It distinguishes the opportunity to express a view, the ability to grasp a conceptual distinction, and the capacity to assess that distinction’s validity. These dimensions clarify why linguistic inclusion must be accompanied by opportunities for reasoned conceptual inquiry. Linguistic access supports semantic agency when it enables learners to understand, justify, and reconsider the distinctions on which knowledge depends. Merely reproducing equivalent terms in several languages does not establish such agency. A learner’s ability to test a definition against counterexamples, explain a translation choice, or revise an interpretation provides stronger evidence. This criterion connects recognition of linguistic diversity with access to shared knowledge and responsibility for the meanings through which learners participate in collective life.
Teacher education should consequently integrate analysis of disciplinary discourse, sustained engagement with multilingual learners, and reflection on language ideologies. Teachers need hermeneutic judgment to decide how familiar languages can support understanding, when explicit linguistic instruction is required, and how cultural recognition can be combined with criticism of exclusion and unequal power. Educational justice, on this account, includes equitable opportunities to articulate experience, be understood, and participate in evaluating shared meanings.
These implications require a critical appropriation of Herder. His defense of common humanity coexists with hierarchical civilizational judgments and ambiguities surrounding Volk that may obscure internal differences and individual autonomy. The reconstruction therefore treats equal dignity, the right to dissent within a community, and the revisability of inherited identities as contemporary normative commitments. Since the inquiry is theoretical, its proposals constitute a framework for educational interpretation and design rather than demonstrated effects of an intervention. Its principal conclusion is that education develops human capacities by joining participation in linguistic traditions with the ability to translate, evaluate, and transform them.
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