Herder’s Constitutive Recognitionalism: Against Condillac and Kant

Abstract Herder is often recognised as the intellectual originator of a tradition that stresses that language assimilation is a wrong. In what follows, I argue that that the way in which he has influenced that tradition is often misunderstood. Herder’s originality does not lie in his development of ‘linguistic constitutivism’ – the view that language plays a constitutive role in human cognition. Herder surely endorsed linguistic constitutivism, but so did earlier theorists, like Condillac, as well as French revolutionary theorists such as l’Abbé Grégoire. The original move that Herder made, I argue, is to add a normative, recognitionalist argument to the constitutive argument, and to intertwine the two. It is his constitutive recognitionalism that makes him the trailblazer of a new tradition.