Seite - 40 - in Reflective Cosmopolitanism - Educating towards inclusive communities through Philosophical Enquiry

40 REfLECTIvE COsMOPOLITANIsM 2. Can you make yourself understandable without knowing the language in a coun- try where people speak a different language? 3. Can a person communicate without speaking the language? 4. What kind of connection is there between speaking and language? 5. Can we speak to ourselves? 6. Why do human beings speak? Exercise: Different languages a. List all the languages spoken by members of your class. b. List all the languages spoken by your relatives. c. List all the languages spoken by your friends. d. Find out which languages in the world have the most speakers. e. Find out which languages are endangered. Thought experiments: a. What if all human beings spoke the same language? b. What if there were no written languages? c. What if there were no names? Exercise: Make up a new language Ask your students to work in pairs or in groups of four. a. Choose some words and write them on the board. b. Then use made-up words instead of the real words. c. Then try to build sentences with the new words. d. Find out how much you will understand when someone speaks in this made-up language. Leading Idea 2: Understanding We use the word understanding in many different ways. If we have a concept of something it is a way of understanding. For example if you want to understand math, you need to understand its formulas. But to understand them you must learn math like you have to learn a new language, you need to learn new symbols, new words and new grammar. But to understand math is not only to learn and to memorize a procedure or sequence of steps but also to try to understand why certain steps are required in a procedure. Often we un- derstand something when we are able to explain it, when we understand a phenomenon or a process. Another way of understanding has to do with comprehension. For example if you read a text you may grasp what it means, but it can also have more than one mean- ing and we might comprehend various meanings. If you say you understand your dog, you might be able to know what he wants when he barks (wants to go outside or get inside) or wags his tail (wants to be petted). When you say you understand a person, it may mean many different things: It could mean you understand the person although s/he speaks another language, for example through body language; it could happen that the person speaks your language and you refer to an unfamiliar phrase s/he has used, so it means to understand the phrase. There is another meaning if you understand a person’s action, because you are trying to put yourself in the other person’s place.