Philosophical Reflections on Language in Standardized Assessment and Pathways to Achieving Cognitive Justice

Abstract

Dominating global educational systems, Standardized Assessment functions not merely as a measurement technology but as a form of cognitive hegemony grounded in a particular philosophy of language.This paper employs Zhang Xusheng’s theoretical framework of the triadic cognitive structure–soma-emotion-meaning–and the language masking effect from Knowing and Speaking , alongside Wang Dongyue’s principle of progressive weakening-compensation , to conduct a dual ontological and epistemological dissection of standardized assessment. The study reveals that standardized testing systematically compresses the complex cognitive generative process (RID model) into a singular symbolic rule-based expression, thereby excluding embodied experiences, indigenous emotions, and marginalized groups’ modes of meaning-making that cannot be captured by standardized symbols. This evaluative mechanism, founded upon a specific conceptual scaffolding, results not only in disembodied assessment outcomes but also engenders profound epistemic injustice. To pursue genuine fairness in educational evaluation, this paper argues for transcending technical improvements in reliability and validity toward ontological-level cognitive justice. Concrete pathways include restoring embodied assessment to accommodate somatic experience, integrating emotional dimensions into
assessment design, and introducing negotiated evaluative mechanisms that embrace pluralistic meanings.
Such an approach aims to establish a multidimensional evaluative ecology capable of witnessing and fostering
learners’ holistic development across the soma-emotion-meaning continuum.