Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought Book

This book is excellent for getting at what Chomsky is after in his search for a Generative Grammar, a system of syntatical rules and transforms that can recursively generate all possible utterance forms of natural languages from biologically hardwired primitives. Strong motivation for the project emerges from the "methodological dualism" Chomsky exposes in empirical accounts of language acquisition and use.

Cognitive scientifically minded accounts, says Chomsky, fail to appreciate the empirical fact that the poverty of stimulus in linguistic acquisition precludes the efficacy of "conditioning" however generously conceived as a possible explanation of how we acquire language. Secondly, even the most sophisticated connectionist models of language acquisition fail to capture the unbounded creative freedom of language users to produce radically novel sentences. Chomsky's naturalistic alternative is an account of a native mental Generative Grammar that allows us to acquire and use language as we do in virtue of our biological make up.

The parallels between Descartes' own views on language and modern linguistic and cognitive scientific thought are interestingly drawn, if not exhaustively detailed. Chomsky's summary is a good snapshot of the book's central theme:

"it seems that after a long interruption, linguistics and cognitive psychology are now turning their attention to approaches to the study of language structure and mental processes which in part originated and in part were revitalized in the "century of genius" and which were fruitfully developed until well into the nineteenth century. The creative aspect of language use is once again a central concern of linguistics, and the theories of universal grammar that were outlined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been revived and elaborated in the theory of transformational generative grammar. With this renewal of the study of universal formal conditions on the system of linguistic rules, it becomes possible to take up once again the search for deeper explanations for the phenomena found in particular languages and observed in actual performance. Contemporary work has finally begun to face some simple facts about language that have been long neglected, for example, the fact that the speaker of a language knows a great deal that he has not learned and that his normal linguistic behavior cannot possibly be accounted for in terms of "stimulus control,""conditioning,""generalization and analogy,""patterns" and "habit structures," or "dispositions to respond," in any reasonably clear sense of these much abused terms. As a result, a fresh look has been taken, not only at language structure, but at the preconditions for language acquisition and at the perceptual function of abstract systems of internalized rules. I have tried to indicate, in this summary of Cartesian linguistics and the theory of mind from which it arose, that much of what is coming to light in this work was foreshadowed or even explicitly formulated in earlier and now largely forgotten studies" (p. 108)