On the Origin is primarily concerned with the question whether the origin of language can be explained in purely natural, human terms or (as Süßmilch had recently argued) only in terms of a divine source. Herder argues in support of the former position and against the latter. His argument is quite persuasive (especially when supplemented on its positive side from the Fragments). But this argument is unlikely to constitute a modern philosopher's main reason for interest in Herder's views about language — deriving its zest, as it does, from a religious background that is, or should be, no longer ours.
Of far greater modern relevance are three related theories which Herder develops: a philosophy of language concerning the very nature of language, thought, and meaning; a theory of interpretation; and a theory of translation. These theories are found scattered through a large number of Herder's works. The following are their main features:
Philosophy of language: language, thought, meaning. Already in the mid-1760s — for example, in On Diligence in Several Learned Languages (1764) and the Fragments (1767-8) — Herder began advancing three fundamental theses in this area:
(1) Thought is essentially dependent on, and bounded in scope by, language — i.e. one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically. (To his considerable credit, Herder normally refrains from a more extreme, but philosophically untenable, version of this thesis, favored by some of his successors, which simply identifies thought with language, or with inner language.)
(2) Meanings or concepts are to be equated — not with the sorts of items, in principle autonomous of language, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equated them, e.g. the referents involved, Platonic forms, or empiricist ideas, but instead — with usages of words.
(3) Conceptualization is intimately bound up with (perceptual and affective) sensation. More precisely, according to what might be called Herder's quasi-empiricist theory of concepts, sensation is the source and basis of all our concepts, but we are able to achieve non-empirical concepts by means of a sort of metaphorical extension from the empirical ones — so that all of our concepts ultimately depend in one way or another on sensation. (On the Cognition contains one of Herder's clearer statements of this position.)
The first two of these theses dramatically overturned the sort of dualistic picture of the relation between language and thought/meaning that had predominated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and thereby essentially founded the philosophy of language as we still know it today.
Hamann has often been credited with introducing something like these two revolutionary theses and then passing them on to Herder (e.g. by Berlin). But that is a mistake; Herder was already committed to them in the mid-1760's, Hamann only much later and under Herder's influence. The third thesis, quasi-empiricism, would be far less widely accepted by philosophers today. However, it may very well be correct too (contrary to first appearances, it need not conflict with thesis (2), the equation of meanings with word-usages; and the most likely modern ground for skepticism about it, a Fregean-Wittgensteinian anti-psychologism concerning meaning that is popular today, may well be mistaken). In addition to making a fundamental contribution to the philosophy of language, these three theses also underpin Herder's theories of interpretation and translation (as we are about to see).
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