SPEECH AS A FORM OF LOVE

THE INVOCATION TO PATANJALI

LITERACY IN MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM

THE FORMATION OF DESIRE

THE NEGATION OF DESIRE

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION

The question I wish to raise in this article is how we are to understand the formative and informative processes of language. At one level, language is understood as a medium for communicating knowledge through propositions that form or represent cognitive understanding and so can be defined as informative. The concern of this article is to explore the scope of this notion of linguistic and conceptual informing and to consider what it overlooks. This concern invites an expansion of the notion of the cognitive, a project that, at least among educational theorists, goes back to Louis Arnold Reid. I accept Reid’s point that ‘cognition’ ‘is often interpreted in far too limited sense—mainly to cognition of facts or concepts expressible in propositional language’ (۱۹۷۳, p. 66), and would add that, since Reid’s writing in the early 1970s matters have not much improved, at least within general educational discourse. To some extent, the influence of theories of language on educational theory has moved on with the widening influence of post-structuralism (Hodgson and Standish, 2009; Peters and Burbules, 2004). Yet, language still remains widely understood in reductive terms; as basically a means of communicating knowledge. The corresponding view of education as the transmission of this knowledge using the tools of language is a common-sense one. Here we can observe how conceptions of language interact with educational theories: transmission from learned to ignorant correlates with a view of language as a tool for communication through propositions. But in the wake of philosophers like Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida, it has become difficult to maintain the view of language as simply a communicative tool (Caputo, 1997; Whiting, 2010; Williams, 2017). Rather, language provides the conditions for the world and the self to be understood, disclosed and formed.