Herder's initial version of narrow expressivism in the Critical Forests was both unsatisfactory and internally inconsistent.

Hamann in his Metacritique, despite verbally echoing Herder’s two doctrines in the philosophy of language, espoused a version of broad expressivism. But Herder adopted narrow expressivism, as those two doctrines already seem to imply. Moreover, after much wrestling with the subject, he eventually developed a very attractive version of narrow expressivism. The key work here was again the Critical Forests. By the time of writing this work, Herder was already committed to the two doctrines in quest