LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE AS A TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCE

Recent work on the topic of transformative experience has centered around the work of L. A. Paul, who distinguishes two different kinds of this type of experience, namely epistemic and personal. An experience is epistemically transformative if the subject learns something she could not have learned without having that kind of experience. An experience is personally transformative if it changes the subject’s core values and sense of self. However, there is a distinct kind of transformative experience that has not yet been systematically investigated—learning a new language. This experience differs from seeing color for the first time, or becoming a parent, or undergoing a religious conversion in several crucial ways. Nonetheless, I argue that learning a new language can be a transformative experience. Chapter 1 features my analysis in the philosophical literature on transformative experience. Chapter 2 introduces three core cases of learning a new language. These cases serve as illustrations of a philosophical analysis, showing that learning a new language is far more complex than is generally acknowledged and that the transformative effects of learning a new language can be as radical as those in the canonical cases of transformative experience (e.g., becoming a parent). Chapter 3 argues that a person’s attachment to a new language makes a language-learning experience personally transformative because being attached to a new language not only allows a person to connect with and acknowledge new knowledge, new communities, and new cultures in an in-depth and intimate way, but also facilitates their changing some of their core values and sense of self. Chapter 4 argues that becoming fluent in a new language is a new kind of transformative experience in that it teaches a person with new knowledge about distinctive aesthetic properties in the texts of the new language, cultivates an empathetic disposition towards a new culture, and reshapes their relationships with certain power structures. Chapter 5 summarizes the main conclusions of the previous chapters and points out two directions for future research.Doctor of Philosoph