Cartesian Linguistics Read online

  Cartesian Linguistics

  In this extraordinarily original and profound work, Noam Chomsky discusses themes in the study of language and mind since the end of the sixteenth century in order to explain the motivations and methods that underlie his work in linguistics, the science of mind, and even politics. This edition includes a new and specially written introduction by James McGilvray, contextualizing the work for the twenty-first century. It has been made more accessible to a larger audience; all the French and German in the original edition has been translated, and the notes and bibliography have been brought up to date. The relationship between the original edition (published in 1966) and contemporary biolinguistic work is also explained. This challenging volume is an important contribution to the study of language and mind, and to the history of these studies since the end of the sixteenth century.

  NOAM CHOMSKY is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  Cartesian Linguistics

  A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought

  Third Edition

  Noam Chomsky

  Professor of Linguistics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Edited by

  James McGilvray

  edited with a new introduction by

  CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi

  Cambridge University Press

  The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

  Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

  www.cambridge.org

  Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521708173

  © Noam Chomsky 2009

  Third edition introduction

  © James McGilvray 2009

  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

  First edition published by Harper & Row 1966; reprinted University Press of America, 1983

  Second edition Cybereditions Corporation, New Zealand 2002

  ISBN 978-0-511-50363-4 mobipocket

  ISBN 978-0-511-50577-5 eBook (Kindle Edition)

  ISBN 978-0-521-88176-0 hardback

  ISBN 978-0-521-70817-3 paperback

  Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

  Contents

  Introduction to the third editionJames McGilvray

  Cartesian Linguistics

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Creative aspect of language use

  Deep and surface structure

  Description and explanation in linguistics

  Acquisition and use of language

  Summary

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction to the third edition

  James McGilvray

  I An overview

  Cartesian Linguistics (CL) began as a manuscript written while Noam Chomsky was a 35-year-old fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. An early version of it was prepared for presentation as a Christian Gauss lecture on Criticism at Princeton University early in 1964. Perhaps because it proved beyond the audience, it was not delivered, and Chomsky presented a general lecture on linguistics as understood at the time. The manuscript, however, was revised and published in 1966. An intellectual tour de force, CL is not an easy text to read, but it is certainly a rewarding one. It is an unprecedented and – so far – unequalled linguistic–philosophical study of linguistic creativity and the nature of the mind that is able to produce it.

  CL begins by describing the sort of linguistic creativity that is found with virtually every sentence produced by any person, including young children. As its subtitle (“A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought”) suggests it will, though, CL soon turns to focus on the kind of mind that is required to make this sort of creativity possible, and on the best way to study such a mind, and language in it. The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes figures prominently in the discussion and the book’s title. This is because he was among the first to recognize the importance of this ‘ordinary’ form of linguistic creativity – creativity exhibited by everyone, not just poets – for the study of the human mind.1 Because of this, and because a group of linguists and philosophers who came after Descartes shared his insight (even though they might have disagreed with Descartes in other ways) and directed their study of language and the mind towards dealing with the issues it posed, Chomsky titled his study of their work and of their opponents’ Cartesian Linguistics. Those who Chomsky thinks can plausibly deal with the issues that linguistic creativity poses for the study of mind and language he calls “rationalists”; those who cannot, he calls “empiricists.” In this introduction I add ‘romantic’ to Chomsky’s label ‘rationalist’ to emphasize what is implicit in a study of ordinary linguistic creativity and its role in human thought and action: that the rationalists of interest to him, like the romantics he focuses on, recognize the centrality in everyday life of freedom of thought and action, and they try with their view of the human mind to speak to how this creativity is possible. For many of them – and certainly for Chomsky in particular – the nature of language itself as a component of the mind/brain plays a central role in the explanation.

  Cartesian Linguistics has many assets. One is that it places Chomsky’s effort to construct a science of language in a broad historical context. It does not pretend to be a work in intellectual history; it is too brief and too selective in the individuals it discusses for that.2 But it does offer important insights into the works of historical figures, and uncovers and discusses often-ignored but clearly relevant historical texts. It also revitalizes a rivalry that has lasted for centuries and that – in 1966 and still now – continues in the cognitive sciences.

  Another asset is the understanding it gives of the basic observations that lie behind Chomsky’s – and other rationalist–romantics’ – research strategy or fundamental methodology for the study of language and mind. There are two sets of observations. One – the “poverty of the stimulus” facts – focuses on the gap between what minds obtain when they acquire a rich and structured cognitive capacity such as vision or language and the small and ‘impoverished’ input that the mind receives as it develops the capacity. Another – the “creative aspect of language use” observations – focuses on the fact that people, even small children, use language in ways that are uncaused and innovative, while still appropriate. Because of its extensive discussion of linguistic creativity, Cartesian Linguistics focuses more than any of the rest of Chomsky’s works on the creativity facts, and explores their implications for the science of mind and the explanation of behavior – and it touches on their broader implications for politics and education, and even art – especially poetry. By describing a form of creativity that everyone exercises in their use of language – a creativity that figures in virtually all thought and action where language figures – it highlights a common phenomenon that seems to defy scientific explanation. Humans use language creatively routinely, yet this routine use seems to be an exercise of free will. If it is, it would hardly be surprising if the tools of science, which work well with determination or randomness, fail to describe or explain the use of language. Free actions are uncaused, hence not determi
ned, yet they are nevertheless typically appropriate, hence not random. To Chomsky, as to other rationalist–romantics, this suggests that if you want to construct a science of mind and language, you should avoid trying to construct a science of how people use their minds, and especially their language. Do not try to construct a science of linguistic behavior. Perhaps, in fact, given the degree to which language infuses and shapes so much of how we understand and act, do not try to construct sciences of action and behavior in general.

  This is not to say that one should not try to construct a science – in fact, many sciences – of the mind. And it did not stop any of the rationalist–romantics – with the partial but puzzling exception of Descartes3 – from trying to construct sciences of mind and language.

  After all, the poverty of the stimulus facts for language and other domains, such as vision and facial recognition, suggest that there can be sciences of at least some components of the mind. They seem to indicate that the mind is made up of innate systems that grow automatically, much as do the human heart and liver. Adopting such a research strategy is called “nativism”; rationalist–romantics are nativists. Adopting this strategy, Descartes to an extent aside, rationalist–romantic strategists aimed in one way or another, and with different degrees of success, to offer species-universal, objective theories of various components of the mind, components of the mind that the tradition called “faculties.” Mental faculties – we would now say “modules” – do seem to work determinately. Or at least, rationalist–romantic efforts, such as Descartes’s ventures into a computational theory of vision, the Port-Royal grammarians’ efforts to produce a Universal (“philosophical”) Grammar, Cudworth’s speculations about the nature of “an innate cognoscitive power,” and von Humboldt’s effort to deal with the mental machinery needed to provide for creativity, have managed with varying success to deal with aspects of deterministic sciences of various faculties. Progress has been much greater since the mid-1950s. David Marr and Chomsky and their co-workers have produced advanced nativist sciences of vision and language. Their obvious success – and the more limited successes of earlier rationalist–romantics – seems to indicate that it is possible to construct sciences of various parts of the mind/brain, although not of the ways in which humans use what these components provide them to deal with the world and otherwise solve various problems.

  The very real risk of failure when one tries to go outside the head to deal with the complexities of human action and behavior suggests that the scientist of mind should focus on what is ‘in the head’ and how what is in a particular person’s head comes to have the shape and ‘content’ that it does – how it ‘grows’. Chomsky’s term for this strategy for the study of mind is “internalist.” In addition to adopting nativist assumptions, rationalist–romantics adopt an internalist approach to the sciences of mind. Linguistic creativity observations seem to suggest that this is the only one likely to prove fully successful. Of course, some of the evidence for a science of what is in the head (although by no means all) comes from observing how a person behaves – in the case of language, how a person pronounces a sentence, and when and where s/he uses it, among other things. But, obviously, an internalist theory of what is in the head is not just a compilation of this or any other kind of evidence; the theory is concerned with what really is in the head and how it works. It is concerned with the principles of operation of a faculty/module, with its internal inputs and outputs, and with how this faculty develops and grows as the organism develops. It does not follow, by the way, that the rationalist–romantic theorist’s nativist and internalist approach to the mind has nothing to say about creative linguistic behavior and action. For as suggested above it can – and does – account both for what in the human mind makes linguistic creativity possible, and for why linguistically informed creative behavior is available only to humans.

  In recent years Chomsky’s label for his approach to mind and language has changed from “rationalistic” to “biolinguistic.” He and others working in the field are now called “biolinguists.” The label change highlights a characteristic of Chomsky’s efforts to construct sciences of language from the start of his work; the aim has always been to try to accommodate the science of language to some natural science, thus biology – for biology alone can explain how language is innate, why it is unique to humans, and how it grows. Nevertheless, biolinguistic research strategy is just the rationalist–romantics’ nativist and internalist strategy updated. The same poverty and creativity observations continue to be honored. Rationalist–romantic (RR) research strategy is alive and well in the practices of biolinguists.

  A third asset of Cartesian Linguistics (CL) is that it points to the central role of linguistic creativity in almost all human affairs. Unlike organisms that lack language, we can and do think and talk about anything, anywhere; we speculate and wonder, question and doubt, organize ourselves in non-kin and non-contact communities, cooperate to carry out projects, live and thrive in many environments, engage in fantasy and play, and so on. Our cognitive capacities in general are much more flexible than those of other creatures. We can adapt to various environments and solve (and create) problems well out of the range of any other kind of creature. We can make and interpret art, develop various forms of religion and the kinds of explanation they offer, develop ourselves and our cultures. Linguistic creativity surely has a central role to play in all this, and the operations of the language faculty in making possible this central feature of what makes us human – giving us our distinctive human natures. The implications of this gift were not lost on A. W. Schlegel or von Humboldt or, following them, Chomsky. Some are political. I discuss some of these briefly in another section of this introduction.

  The introduction has four parts. In the next, Part II, I discuss in more detail the place of the rationalist–romantic view of the mind and its study in Chomsky’s work, and explain how this view, and along with it his science of mind, have developed since 1966’s Cartesian Linguistics to become contemporary biolinguistics. I also contrast it to the empiricist view of the right strategy to use in investigating the mind, focusing on some of empiricism’s contemporary versions. One of my aims in this part is to emphasize the importance of taking Descartes’s creativity observations seriously. Doing this while also taking seriously the poverty of the stimulus observations leads – I suggest – to the remarkable progress seen in recent years in the scientific study of mind and language. Part III focuses on Descartes and his contributions and failures. The other, Part IV, takes up briefly some of the implications of biolinguistic study of language and mind for politics and education.

  Readers might want to read Chomsky’s rich text right now, and return to Part II to learn more about the RR strategy for the study of mind, and about progress in Chomsky’s approach to language since 1966. Alternatively, they might want to read Part II now to get an overview of the RR research strategy and why it seems to lead to progress in the science of mind where empiricist strategy seems to fail. Parts III and IV are for those who become curious about Descartes’s specific contributions, and about the implications of an internalist and nativist research strategy for politics and education.

  This third edition of CL, like an earlier second, is in English alone. In the original 1966 text, Chomsky left many quotations drawn from the works of those he discusses in French or German; for the most part, he used translations only if they were available at the time.

  To make the second edition more accessible to the wider audience CL deserves, Susan-Judith Hoffmann translated the texts in German that remained, and Robert Stoothoff the parts that remained in French. Most of the French translations of Descartes’s works that Chomsky had included in the original have been replaced with improved ones from later translations – specifically, those available in volumes 1–3 of John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and (for the third volume alone) Anthony Kenny’s Cambridge editions of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. With all translati
ons, an effort was made to suit both the original text and Chomsky’s terminology. Sometimes this required minor modifications in available translations to make clear what Chomsky seems to have seen in the untranslated originals. I cannot – no one can – guarantee that the translations or changes exactly capture what the original texts intended, of course, but the overall result meets, I believe, the demands of both scholar and student, thanks to Professors Stoothoff and Hoffmann’s admirable work. Finally, I thank a former graduate student (now professor), Steve McKay, for his work in the preparation of an index for the second edition; the original had no index at all. The current index modifies McKay’s to accommodate this introduction.

  Note the following conventions: Chomsky’s endnote numbers continue from those of the new introduction. Editorial additions to Chomsky’s notes appear in square brackets ([. . .]); for the most part, these additions offer suggestions for further study. Chomsky’s references to texts and pages remain as they were in the original; all additions have the form (Author, date of publication: page). I added bibliographical items dated after 1966.

  Noam Chomsky read this introduction early in 2008 and sent me many useful comments. I am very grateful; his comments led to several changes and improvements. In two places, I simply quoted what he had to say. I am also very grateful to Cedric Boeckx, Oran Magal, and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri for reading drafts of this introduction. I don’t doubt that errors remain. They are, however, entirely mine.

  II The science of mind and language

  II.1 Creativity and poverty: internalists, nativists, and their opponents