3.

On the History of Universal Grammar

James McGilvray, McGill University

Introduction

‘Universal Grammar’ (UG) is a technical term in what has become an increasingly successful

effort to construct a biologically based natural science of language and of its development in the

individual and the human species. Like any term in a science that has made progress since the

term’s introduction, its use and application have undergone several changes, some of them

major. And like any term in a formalized natural science that has made progress, its connection

with possible commonsense cognates such as “general grammar” or “universal grammar”

(without the capitals) is uninteresting. My history of UG begins with its introduction within the

work of Chomsky. That history – a short one that begins about 50 years ago and ends for

purposes of this chapter at time of writing – appears in outline in section I.

Most readers of this volume expect something else. A few might expect a general discussion of

the uses of the term ‘universal grammar’ and its cognates and component terms and their

cognates in various languages at various times in the works of the thousands who made efforts to

make sense of language and universality. They will not get that here. They are unlikely to get

anything of that sort at all; it would go back to Plato and before, would fill several volumes, and

would fail to get published, or probably even read. The sensible reader looking for a history

might expect a discussion of figures, views, and texts prior to Chomsky’s work that detail

influences on his accounts of language and of UG. Remaining within the 20th century, several

have done this, including Chomsky. It is easy to find accounts of Chomsky’s instructors, of
various individuals and views he was sympathetic to and confronted, of the works he read and

was influenced by and reacted against as he developed his account of language and UG. This

can be good intellectual history, but with rapidly diminishing returns as one attempts to go

further back.

Abandoning intellectual history proper, Chomsky went further back on a different project –

looking for connections between his work on language and UG in the works of others from the

17th century to the 19th. While this project of looking for precedents and parallels continues, his

most expansive effort (and among the earliest) is found in his intriguing Cartesian Linguistics

(CL). A brief but complex and rich work, CL very selectively places various philosophers,

linguists, poets, and polymaths from the 17th to 19th centuries in a ‘rationalist’ or ‘Cartesian’

group with which he was and is sympathetic, or an ‘empiricist’ one that he took (and takes) to be

a methodological dead end. Chomsky explicitly denied that CL was a work in history; it is a

different form of intellectual exercise. It is an historically illuminating account of factors that

contributed towards the current technical understanding of UG and an acknowledgment of some

of Descartes’s central contributions to the natural science of language. It proved to be

controversial, raising the ire of intellectual historians, linguists, and several others who read it. I

am in what may be the minority who find CL illuminating, plausible, and undeserving of most

(but not all) of the criticism it has received. I use the opportunity this chapter offers to try to say

why, and to do so in a way that will – I hope – be useful to those who are unfamiliar with CL

itself.

To anticipate objections of one sort, the history of the technical term “Universal Grammar” with

which I begin is integral to the discussion of CL and its different project too. As mentioned, CL

notes the efforts of some individuals from Descartes through Humboldt who explored different
aspects of an internalist and nativist strategy for the natural science study of mind and language.

That strategy culminates in the current biolinguistic program for the study of language and UG.

This is a program that in Chomsky’s and others’ hands is by the standards of natural science

research not just the most recent but the most successful research program for the study of

language and UG. It is most successful because it offers the best opportunity so far to explain

and describe the nature of ‘the human language’ and the specific contribution of biology to it.

Earlier efforts described in CL were on the right track in some ways, and current work indicates

how. Prior to Chomsky, however, the individuals CL places among the rationalists lacked the

specific formal tools, the creation of biology as a natural science and the branch of it that studies

organic development ( “evo-devo”), and the focused efforts of individuals who are consciously

engaged in making progress in advancing the natural science of language and UG. They also

often also held views and harbored unwarranted assumptions that prevented them from

accomplishing more than they did.

Keep in mind that the labels “rationalist” and “empiricist” are themselves semi-technical terms.

While they have historical significance, they are intended as labels for research strategies for the

study of mind. The rationalist takes seriously poverty of the stimulus observations with regard to

the acquisition of various mental capacities, including language – its combinatory mechanisms

and its primitive concepts and sounds – and assumes that it is reasonable in studying the mind to

suppose that at least some, and perhaps a great deal of what is ‘in’ the mind is actually the

product of natural growth; it is ‘innate’.1 This is an assumption; if it leads to successful theories,

1
‘Innate’ implies neither consciousness nor realization of a concept or a language at birth, or
ever. Generally (but perhaps not universally), an innate concept needs to develop to be available,
and it needs to be ‘triggered’ by some relevant ‘input’ to develop at all. The important
then it has some empirical warrant. In the case of the study of language specifically (and perhaps

other systems to an extent), the rationalist also takes seriously Descartes’s “creative aspect of

language use” observations and assumes that the proper object of the study of language is not its

use by humans (in ‘communities’ or not), but the (native) system(s) that provide the materials

needed for use – cognitive ‘tools’ offered by sententially expressed “perspectives” (Chomsky’s

term). The rationalist is also an ‘internalist’, drawn to assuming mental modularity, and – when

combined with the success of theories that proceed on the assumption that ‘content’ is innate – to

a kind of ‘constructivism’ that supposes that the mind’s internal systems (‘mental content’)

largely fix how the mind can conceive the world. The empiricist is the opposite: the empiricist

rejects nativism (especially in recent years with regard to language-specific notions), and is

externalist with regard both to ‘mental content’ and field of study. Modularity too is as a rule

denied. With regard to language, the empiricist assumes (in line with common sense) that

languages are public entities outside the head, perhaps institutions or practices of communities,

invented by humans in order to communicate.

I. A short history of Universal Grammar

If we take the use of ‘Universal Grammar’ (UG) to be that found in at least one instantiation of

Chomsky’s Minimalist linguistic program, its immediate history could begin around the year

2000 with the introduction of different versions of the syntactic operation Merge, followed by

2005’s “Three Factors” paper and more recent work (e.g., 2008). Taken together, UG becomes

the biological (genomic, not physical, chemical, computational…) innate contributions to a

neonate infant’s genome-specified ‘initial state’ of a “language faculty.” At birth, the faculty

considerations are that the concept develop swiftly and internal systems both ‘anticipate’ the
nature of the concept and fix the nature of the relevant trigger(s).
(UG) is a biologically based developmental agenda in a human infant’s head that when given

input that the faculty specifies, automatically develops into a child’s I-language or I-languages.

The faculty so conceived is a nature-based ‘mechanism’ of sorts that yields a specific version (an

“I-language”) of a natural language in accord with a biological ‘channeling’ procedure, a

procedure that receives needed input and – relying also on non-biological (physical, etc) and

non-specific development constraints – yields a stable ‘final state’ in a child’s mind/brain by the

age of 3;5 or 4. The final state is thus the result of 1) genetic specification (biology), 2) ‘input’

or ‘experience’, and 3) other non-genetic developmental constraints, such as constraints on

effective computation.

This recent version of UG relies on insights from the early 1980s built into what was introduced

then and called the “principles and parameters” program. By introducing parameters thought of

as pre-specified alternative courses of development that yield the different structures,

sounds/signs, and perhaps concepts of human languages, the program offered a reasonable way

to address the issue of how a child acquires an I-language under the conditions described in the

“poverty of the stimulus” observations. It also offered the opportunity to extend the scope of

efforts to not just describe UG and the various I-languages that could develop from it, but to

explain how the uniquely human capacity to acquire and use languages came to be introduced to

the human species (evolution). In effect, it offered the opportunity to begin to include in the

explanatory task of the natural scientist of language the job of not just getting an answer to the

acquisition issue (popularly called “Plato’s Problem”) and what might be called – lexical item

‘choice’ aside – the “diversity of language” issue, but that of beginning to try in a serious way to

address questions concerning the biological basis of language. Due further to the (2005)

introduction of ‘third factor’ considerations – non-genomic and non language-specific physical,

chemical, and computational constraints on the way(s) that biological systems develop – at least

some parametric options no longer needed to be a part of the human genetic (biological)

endowment. Some, or possibly all, could be due to these ‘third factor’ constraints on the

development of what Chomsky sometimes calls “the language organ.” Maximizing third factor

constraints and the options they provide in an account of language growth in the child minimizes

the contribution that biology must make to the development of a specific I-language. In doing

so, it very considerably reduces the ‘load’ on an account of language’s evolution. By including

physical, chemical, computational, and other constraints among the contributions to the

development of a biological system (Thompson (1917/1942), Turing (1992), Kauffman (1993)),

Carroll (2005), among others), the evolution of language could now be seen as the result of a

single transmissible mutation in a single human being. The evolution of language would not,

then, need to build a complex developmental instruction set, nor require many millennia and

many generations. This is a great advantage: there is no evidence of gradual evolution of

language, but there is the fact of what Jared Diamond called the “great leap forward” in human

cognitive capacities some 60 thousand years or so ago; the introduction of language at a single

step makes sense of that. Note that 3rd factor considerations add to the notion of the genetically

innate (UG) another form of innate contribution: the “non-genomically innate,” as Christopher

Cherniak (2005) puts it). Even though the current version of UG offers the opportunity to

minimize biological nativism (language-specific genetic instructions), it is heavily committed to

other forms of nativism.

The history of UG as currently understood could end here. According to it, UG (the biologically

innate) might consist solely of what Chomsky calls “Merge” in its mathematically and

empirically allowable forms, yielding recursion (Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch (2002) and follow-up
discussion) and hierarchy. Perhaps, however, UG also includes some parameters that turn out to

be included in the evolved genetic specification of UG. That is a question for empirical study to

settle; it is reasonable now to believe it includes at least Merge. Or rather, the history of UG so

understood could end with this, if we were to assume that at the time(s) in the period between 50

and 100 thousand years ago at which the mutation(s) that led to the introduction of Merge plus

genetically specified parameters, humans had in place at least rudimentary operative concept-

acquisition and phonological-phonetic-acquisition mechanisms. If UG were to include the

genetic specification of ‘meaning’ (concept) and linguistic ‘sound’-acquisition systems, the study

of UG would be very much more complicated. On methodological grounds alone, it is wise to

restrict oneself to the core computational system.

One could also, however, include in the history of UG an earlier stage. That would include

discussion in the 1960s (Chomsky’s Language and Mind and Eric Lenneberg’s 1964 paper on

acquisition followed by his (1967), plus the early 1970s discussions (a conference on

biolinguistics arranged by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini) of the possibility of accommodating UG

as then understood to biology. The issue of how UG was conceived at that time was dominated

by the 1965 Aspects picture of UG and of how a child’s mind ‘chooses’ a grammar, given

relevant input. That view of acquisition had precedents in earlier work too (e.g., The Logical

Syntax of Linguistic Theory). It posed a serious barrier to making the study of language into a

natural science and accommodating the theory of language to biology. If UG is what biology

contributes to the growth of language, and if UG is rich and complex, its evolution cannot be

saltational, but must be gradual, requiring many millennia to gradually increase complexity in

the genetic instruction set. If so, accommodation to biology looks hopeless: there is no evidence

of language evolution of this sort (see in this regard Lewontin (1998)). One can, of course tell a
story of the sort told by Pinker and Bloom (1990), but that is not science. And given the current

view of UG, it is unnecessary: the much-simplified version of UG now available allows for a

saltational view of evolution. The Aspects account was inadequate on other grounds too, of

course. While it represented progress over anything that had appeared before, and progress

especially over so-called “empiricist” accounts, its solution to the acquisition and difference

problems was unwieldy and demanded too much ‘choice’. It also lacked theoretical simplicity,

its theoretical vocabulary lacked precision, and it placed a heavy load on computation.

One could also go back to even earlier works of Chomsky’s (Syntactic Structures, Logical

Structure of Linguistic Theory, Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, and articles that discuss

the mathematics of linguistic syntax) to bring out the fact that a major contribution to the effort

to construct a natural science of language lay in producing an appropriate theoretical formalism

to describe UG, natural language, specific languages, I-languages, and the character of linguistic

processing. That had been completely missing in pre-Chomsky work, and its lack provides one

of several reasons for stopping the history of UG as a technical term at this point, going no

further. The reason is simple: an appropriate and explicit set of formal terms (one of several

demands made on a natural science) is needed if one is going to make any progress at all in

developing a science. Nothing of the sort was offered by the historical individuals Chomsky

considers in his Cartesian Linguistics, and the efforts of Zellig Harris, Bloomfield, and others in

the 20th century were flawed because of their assumptions about what a natural language is and

how to investigate one. Perhaps they and those who after Chomsky continued to attempt an

empiricist approach to language managed from time to time to come up with insights and

suggestions that when reconceived became useful; Harris’s “transformations” are an example.

But, lacking an understanding of what they had to deal with, they did not and could not do so in a
principled way, guided by the idea that language is a biologically (and not physically, etc) based

‘organ’ inside the human head that develops and operates in accord with its own internal

principles and procedures, so that its study is a study of a natural object, not a socially

constructed entity.

In the interests of completeness, the history of the technical term ‘Universal Grammar’ outlined

above could be supplemented with works from many others, including some of Chomsky’s

critics. It could include post-Chomsky 1950s contributions from Halle, Postal, Ross, McCawley,

Jackendoff, Pinker, and many others working both within and (for contrast, if nothing else)

outside the specific line of development found in Chomsky’s work while remaining within the

general methodological assumptions and framework required by thinking of language as a

biological ‘organ’. It could also include post-Chomsky non-linguist contributions (Lila

Gleitman, S. J. Gould, R. Lewontin, E. Lenneberg, C. R. Gallistel, and many others).

II. The contribution of Cartesian Linguistics

II. 1. What kind of work is Cartesian Linguistics?

One might think CL is a work in intellectual history. First, there is the subtitle: “A Chapter in

the History of Rationalist Thought.” Second, in co-editors Halle and Chomsky’s Preface to the

first (1966) edition, there is the category of work in which Cartesian Linguistics is obviously

meant to fall: it is one of a proposed group of “background studies placing … various

approaches to the study of language [in this case, Chomsky’s rationalist approach] in the

appropriate historical and intellectual setting.” Third, there is the remark in Chomsky’s
introduction (1966: 1; 2009: 57)2 that what follows in the text can be seen as a “discussion of the

history of linguistics in the modern period,” followed by the suggestion that the part of the

“modern period” that he aims to discuss has been ignored by “modern linguistics” (meaning that

of Bloomfield, Harris, Joos, etc).

However, just below (2; 57-8) that remark is an outline of what Chomsky actually attempts in the

volume. It is highly selective, with selection driven by the current (and continuing) “concerns

and problems” of someone like himself, engaged in constructing a science of language as he was

and is. He says:

I … limit myself here to … a preliminary and fragmentary sketch of some of the

leading ideas of Cartesian linguistics with no explicit analysis of its relation to

current work that seeks to clarify and develop these ideas. The reader acquainted

with current [1965-66] work in so-called “generative grammar” should have little

difficulty in drawing these connections for himself. Questions of current interest

will, however determine the general form of this sketch, that is, I will make no

attempt to characterize Cartesian linguistics as it saw itself, but rather will

concentrate on the development of ideas that have reemerged, quite independently in

current work. My primary aim is simply to bring to the attention of those involved

in the study of generative grammar and its implications some of the little-known

work which has bearing on their concerns and problems and which often anticipates

some of their specific conclusions.

2
From now on I omit dates in references to CL. The first number indicates pages in the first
(1966) edition, the number after the semicolon pages in the third (2009).
Further, in some remarks in his 1970s televised and then published discussion with Foucault, he

says of his approach to the texts of Descartes and other historical figures who figure in CL:

I approach classical rationalism not really as a historian of science or …

philosophy, but from the rather different point of view of someone who has a

certain range of scientific notions and is interested in seeing how at an earlier

stage people may have been groping towards these notions, possibly without even

realizing what they were groping towards. …. One might say that I’m looking at

history not as an antiquarian … interested in finding out and giving a precisely

accurate account of what the thinking of the 17th century was – I don’t mean to

demean that activity, it’s just not mine – but rather from the point of view of … an

art lover who wants to look at the 17th century to find in it things that are of

particular value and that obtain part of their value … because of the perspective

with which he approaches them” (Elders 1974: 143).

It is clear: for Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics is not a work in intellectual history. Rather – as

suggested above – it details ways in which various individuals contributed to (and in the case of

‘empiricists’ attempted to undermine) the institution of and refinements in a naturalistic research

strategy for the scientific study of mind and language initiated (Chomsky’s title suggests) at

around the time of Descartes, and – to an extent that Chomsky considers significant – by

Descartes. Its focus is fixed by work current in 1966 and – given now the history in part I – its

more successful successors. And it illuminates both historical figures and works and current
work.

On reflection, no one should expect to extend the history of the technical term “UG” in a science

invented in the 20th century back to the 17th, or hope to find a science invented in the 17th (or

according to some of Chomsky’s critics, well before) that extends to 1966. Physics and

chemistry plausibly have such histories, but not the science of language.

II.2. Why Descartes?

What is Cartesian about Cartesian linguistics? Descartes’s connection to linguistics then and

now might appear remote. He had nothing of interest to say about language itself. He did,

though, have interesting and important things to say about language use and the implications of

these observations for natural science. He also was with Galileo and a few others one of the

originators of the methods of modern formal naturalistic theory construction. And he made some

interesting and relevant observations concerning innateness, including some that appear to

demand what we would now think of as biological (or at least biological, physical, chemical,

computational…) explanation. Perhaps it is these three contributions taken together that led

Chomsky to call his study “Cartesian Linguistics.” All contributions are novel with Descartes in

some identifiable way. Each deserves attention. Each has important implications for the science

of language and mind, not always recognized by Descartes or others at his time – and in one

case, only fully recognized very recently.

In his Discourse and in slightly different forms elsewhere Descartes offered what is plausibly the

most articulate and relevant of the very few efforts available at his time to describe natural

science methodology. Some might hold that that honor belongs to Bacon. But Bacon’s dicta
bear primarily on gathering and organizing data or evidence, not on the more central matters of

constructing theories – indicating what they should aim for and accomplish.3 Others might point

out that Descartes left things out, such as Galileo’s emphasis on simplicity – but it appears in

Descartes’s methods in different form. To see that he acknowledged its importance and

managed to do quite well at approximating our current understanding of the desiderata of

naturalistic scientific research, I begin by listing those desiderata. There are seven.

First and second, a successful natural science must be both descriptively and explanatorily

adequate. Third, it should employ appropriate formal symbols, and fourth, it should aim towards

simplicity. The latter is hard to define but readily recognized by practitioners of a science. Fifth,

natural science theories should allow for and seek accommodation with other sciences. In the

case of the science of language, the obvious candidate is biology.4 Sixth, natural science must

aim for objectivity, where this amounts to ensuring as well as possible that law statements track

the structures and events of natural objects and processes as best we can understand them

(through successful theories). And seventh, natural science theories should improve in one or

more the above six desiderata. To do so indicates that the theories are correct. Descartes did not

bother with progress. He should have. For Descartes, natural science amounted to his contact

mechanics, which he believed applied to all ‘extended substance’. He was much too confident

about his theory’s longevity, as Newton’s law of gravitation fifty years later showed. Newton’s

law postulated what was for common sense an arcane force far removed from the

commonsensical notion of action through contact. Those familiar with the science of language

3
For more discussion of this and related matters, see my (forthcoming-b).
4
Current empiricists (and many students) prefer neurology. A look at empiricist efforts indicates
that they assume without defense a picture of neural nets congenial to their apriori assumption of
learning plasticity (with no consideration of evo-devo and the like).
should think in terms of Deep Structures and the more arcane-looking successor denizens of the

‘machinery’ of linguistic derivation/computation.

Exercising critical scrutiny and some charity, one can find a large majority of these desiderata in

the Discourse’s four rules. Descartes’s much-disputed first rule is not to accept as true anything

unless one is certain of it, where certainty amounts to having the claim “present itself to my mind

so clearly and distinctly that I had not occasion to doubt it” (CSM I: 120). Certainty – especially

Descartes’s psychological-looking version of it – does not belong in natural science. Clarity and

distinctness, however, resonate with some of the seven desiderata and with current practice in the

natural sciences. They resonate with the demand to break things down into simples (what in

Descartes’s time would be called “corpuscles”), to employ precise formalization (for Descartes,

mathematics and geometry), and to seek simplicity in the theories one constructs. A

contemporary version of some of these desiderata appears in Colin McGinn’s (1994) CALM

(“combinatory atomism and lawlike mappings). Notice that insisting on “clarity and

distinctness” distorts matters when applied to objects and events as understood in the

commonsense domain, where interests of humans play central roles in ‘defining’ things. Into

what does one analyze a shirt – sleeves, shoulders, main body, collar, cuffs? What about buttons

and zippers? Individual threads? The strands that make up the threads? The molecules of which

Lycra is composed? The point: do not start; you lose the shirt. Shirts are ‘tools’ of a sort

manufactured for human use, and their parts – whatever they might in any specific case be –

subserve the relevant purpose. Analysis into ‘simples’ misses the point. With the natural

science of language, on the other hand, the lexical item “shirt” might be analyzed into ‘sound’

(phonological) and ‘meaning’ features (“semantic features,” in Chomsky’s terminology), perhaps

– depending on one’s view of syntax and morphology – ‘formal’ features too. At each level of
‘grain’, one needs arguments that that degree of simplification is adequate for the purposes of the

theory and its lawlike principles: with semantic features, for example, it is useful to break a

word’s meaning down into more primitive features because this allows for a plausible account of

swift meaning/concept acquisition, and provides a way to account for differences between

different I-languages, even though from the point of view of syntax, a word’s semantic features

might be treated as a unitary whole. As these and many more examples show, natural science

hypotheses introduce concepts alien to and out of reach of commonsense understanding with its

innate concepts.5

The second rule adds little to the first: “divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many

parts as possible as may be required in order to resolve them better.” Again, this applies usefully

in science (with ‘possible’ depending on theoretical purposes), not to commonsense objects and

commonsense actions and events. A walk to the store is not understood as n numbers of steps, or

m number of left knee joint flexions, etc. “John walked slowly on Saturday to the store,” on the

5
After the invention of natural science in the 17th century, no one should be surprised – for
reasons like those above and others – that the entities and concepts of the natural sciences (or at
least, those of the more advanced forms) are remote from common sense and its form of
understanding the world, or what Descartes called “bon sens.” Descartes himself did not fully
realize this implication of his method. He argued that good sense or common sense (sometimes
also identified by him with ‘reason’) must be supplemented with his method (which yields
science) to reach truth; see, for example, “The Search for Truth” in CSM II and its portrayal of
Polyander’s development. That the results of following the method surprise the person of
unaided common sense indicates that they have as a result come to understand in a way that they
had not before.
Descartes seems to have recognized the distinction in another form, however. He
distinguished the concepts (‘ideas’) that appear in science from the innate ‘common notions’ of
common sense. The distinction appears in several places, including his reply to objections to the
sixth meditation, and is implicit in his reply to Regius in Comments on a Certain Broadsheet. In
a letter to Mersenne in CSM III (182-3), he explains with the example of the sun. There is for
common sense the ‘common notion’ we have of the sun (rising and setting, etc…) and for
science the “invented” or “made up” concept the scientist creates in creating a natural science
theory. That example would be significant to his audience.
other hand, might from the point of view of Pietroski’s semantic theory (2005) be understood in

a ‘neo-Davidsonian’ way: event e is a walk, and e is slow, and agent is John, and….

The third is to “direct … thoughts in an orderly manner, by beginning with the simplest and most

easily known and by supposing some order even among objects that nave no natural order of

precedence.” Descartes no doubt associated this rule with his foundationalism; we must ignore

that aspect. The rule is also, however, a way of anticipating the notion of the unity of the

sciences – something Descartes insisted on in the Rules too. If it is read as a demand for some

kind of reductionism in the sciences, it is unwarranted and too strong, given what is actually

exhibited by scientific practice. If softened to something like a demand for accommodation

between appropriate sciences, however, we find in this rule an early version of the desideratum

that a science be accommodated to another, or others. It is a central aim of current practice in

biolinguistics to do this, making it possible to accommodate to biology and a plausible account

of evolution.

And the fourth and last: “throughout to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so

comprehensive, that I could be sure of leaving nothing out (CSM 120). Here there is little need

for charity: this looks like the demand that a theory of descriptively and explanatorily adequate

to its domain. Of course, as mentioned, Descartes thought that natural science had a single

domain – the ‘extended’ – but we can ignore the several problems with that. And we can and

should recognize that one can have natural sciences of the mind that are descriptively and

explanatorily adequate to their specific domains – vision, perhaps, or language – although not

language use.
The four rules do not touch on progress; Descartes foolishly believed that his method quickly

yields truth. (Note the confidence he displays in Discourse V concerning his contact mechanics.)

Nor do they bear explicitly on objectivity understood as ‘built into nature’ – or at least, nature as

we can understand it. That can be assumed, however; it is presupposed in what he has to say

about his contact mechanics and its scope – apparently, everything in the domain of ‘body’ or

extension. Progress and perhaps objectivity aside, then, his rules anticipate our current view of

natural science methodology.

Descartes’s second unique contribution to the science of language lies in his observations

concerning the creativity of language use and the implications he drew for the natural science of

mind. Appearing in part V of the 1637 Discourse (with no precedents of which I am aware) and

expanded on by Cordemoy (1666)), the creative aspect observations amount to three. 1)

Language use appears to be free of internal or external stimulus control: I can think (a dominant

example of language use) about anything, anywhere, under any description, without regard to

external or internal causal influence. Stimuli of either kind might “incite and incline” me to

think or speak one way or another, without in any way causing it. In effect, an audience or I

might find in some prior thought or external condition a reason for me to think or say such-and-

such. But neither prior nor simultaneous condition constitutes a cause. Those committed to a

causal program (e.g., Fodor’s ‘computational theory of mind’) will claim a cause of some sort,

but that is all it is – a claim, which appears to be inconsistent with these observations and

theoretical considerations.6 2) Language use appears also to come in any of an unbounded

number of forms. The unbounded forms can be – and in a generative theory are – the

computational products of a finite set of operations on a finite set of words or lexical items.

6
For discussion, see the relevant appendix in Chomsky and McGilvray (forthcoming).
There is no upper limit, even with regard to a specific ‘inciting or inclining’ circumstance.

Someone stumbling over another person’s foot could be described appropriately in many ways,

with no upper bound on the ways that are appropriate. 3) While not being caused and while

taking any number of forms, given a specific circumstance or question posed (or some other

‘reason to speak or think’), what a person says or thinks remains appropriate, or ‘reasonable’.

The creative aspect observations are to be taken as a group. One can program a computer to

produce any number of ‘well-formed’ language-appearing outputs, and do so randomly, thereby

modeling a form of stimulus freedom and unboundedness. But there has been no success in

programming a computer that can meet all three conditions at the same time. Notice further that

it is important that these observations bear not on the nature of whatever computational system

generates sentential expressions, but on the use to which such expressions are put by human

beings. Humans can (and do) have computational systems in their heads that could yield endless

numbers of sentences or expressions (linguistic competence), and sciences of language focus on

this competence. But the use of the expressions of the expressions by humans appears to be

beyond the reach of the sciences of language and mind, at least as we humans understand the

nature of natural science so far. In effect, we can and do have sciences of language and its

development in an infant, but no science of language use. Only an internalist (‘in the head’)

approach to language – without regard to use by people – allows for an adequate (by the

standards above) natural science of human I-languages and the ways that they develop. No

adequate explanatory natural science of language has, or apparently can, deal with the uses to

which a specific person puts what his or her computational system offers. These facts about use

and the scope of a science of language conflict with deeply held views of philosophers,
psychologists, and other cognitive scientists, including many in the 16th and 17th centuries and

still now.

Descartes made another important contribution to the science of language and mind. He was not

the first to offer some form of poverty of the stimulus observations; perhaps Plato was first,

although Plato did not actually state any in detail. Descartes made some progress in that regard

in his several discussions of the concept of a triangle and in the ways he expressed the conditions

for development or acquisition for what he called “adventitious” (‘triggered’ or ‘occasioned’) but

still innate concepts. Further, he was arguably among the first to think about what kinds of

constraints these observations imposed on the study of mind – a job done in much greater detail

soon afterwards by Ralph Cudworth and pursued in more detail with regard to language by

Humboldt. Descartes noted that being innate does not require actualization/activation, but is

compatible with needing some kind of ‘triggering’ event or ‘input’ in order to develop; these are

what he called “adventitious” ideas. Further, given the analogy to diseases that might arise in

some families (CSM I: 303-304), a concept’s development might not only require triggering, but

might require a course of development or growth, one that we (not he) would seek to describe

and explain by use of biology and the other sciences involved in “evo-devo.” In addition, he

held on reasonable grounds that the nature of a concept that develops depends not on the event(s)

that trigger or begin its development, but depend instead on the internal system(s) that fix its

nature. And finally, he noted that not all concepts are innate; some are ‘invented’, or ‘made up’.

The latter include the important concepts invented by the scientist when s/he constructs a theory.

His example (CSM III: 182-3; see also n.5 above) contrasts the innate although adventitious

‘common notion’ of the sun with the concept the scientist invents. The invented concepts can be

taken to be products of his method, which can also be called a procedure for what Chomsky calls
“science formation,” a procedure only underwritten guided by the ‘light of nature’ we all have

available, but only occasionally follow. The concepts that are innate (‘anticipated’ by the mind,

as in Cudworth’s (1996) “proleptic”) limit the domain of common sense. Scientific concepts are

a different matter. Descartes was likely alone in bringing together for the first time these

observations and points.

I am not suggesting that Descartes himself or any of the others portrayed as rationalists in CL

recognized all of the implications of these contributions of Descartes, or that any of them prior to

Chomsky and the introduction of the relevant formalism, the development the science of biology,

and the focused efforts of many working within a particular field actually managed to develop a

natural science of language – or even realize that that was what work within the rationalist

strategy as applied to language in the head could lead to. Notoriously, and yet given what was

available to him, Descartes denied that there could be a natural science of mind or language at

all. And Descartes was certainly no scientist of language; nor he fully recognize the implications

of his contributions. Rather, I am suggesting that these crucial contributions to the natural

science of language as we now understand it, are the reason CL is ‘Cartesian’. They explain why

Chomsky chose to give Descartes the honor of initiating a research strategy and a natural science

methodology that leads to a remarkable degree of success in the study of language and mind.

Space limitations prevent discussing any of the other individuals mentioned in CL and their

contributions towards refining the rationalist strategy for the study of mind and its current forms.

Perhaps the discussion of Descartes’s contributions and of what has become of Chomsky’s

science of language are enough to explain briefly what went wrong with some of Chomsky’s

critics’ efforts.
II.3.

I will be very selective in the individuals and critiques discussed. I do not discuss Hans

Aarsleff’s two attempts to denounce CL or George Lakoff’s early review. I also ignore many

later efforts to criticize CL (they continue to appear) that are derivative or simply misunderstand.

Some reviewers did read CL carefully and attempted to address it – or at least parts of it. The

two I focus on are Robin Lakoff (1969) with her review of a then-new edition of Lancelot and

Arnauld’s Grammaire générale et raisonnée, and Vivian Salmon (1969) reviewing CL itself.

Karl Zimmer (1968) deserves discussion too, but space limitations prevent anything but mention.

I emphasize that I have had the advantage – and as the discussion above should indicate, it is an

advantage – of seeing what has become of the study of language after almost five decades of

exercising a rationalist research strategy for the study of mind that adopts natural science

methodology. I can see what even Chomsky in 1966 could not have seen – how important

certain aspects of Descartes’s contributions proved to be. If Chomsky could not fully appreciate

them in the 60s, Robin Lakoff and Salmon would appreciate them less. And they had an

additional excuse. Chomsky was sometimes careless in what he wrote. In addition to factors

mentioned before such as a subtitle that gives the impression that CL is history, CL includes

remarks like this: “the Port-Royal Grammar, in which a Cartesian approach to language is

developed, for the first time” (33;79). This looks like a precedence and influence claim and is

easy to read historically. Caveats to the effect that is not what Chomsky is doing tend to be

ignored. In any case, they do have an excuse for treating CL historically, and for focusing

almost entirely on the claim to originality and the ‘Cartesian’ nature of the Grammaire. I do not

think that this completely exonerates them, given Chomsky’s claims that he is not trying to trace

influences in detail. But it makes their efforts understandable.

I will comment only on their success at showing that the Grammaire offers nothing new or

distinctly Cartesian. Lakoff argues that Lancelot developed some of the Grammaire’s

‘Cartesian’ insights (specifically concerning ellipsis and deletion) in an earlier work, and

emphasizes that in a late edition of that work, Lancelot attributed his insights in turn to the 16th

century’s Sanctius. If she was correct, the Grammaire was neither original nor Cartesian.

Salmon in her historical tour de force traces the Grammaire’s notions of generality/universality

and hidden (“Deep”) structure to a wide variety of pre-Grammaire non-Cartesian precedents,

sometimes remote. Her erudition is impressive. Generally, if they correctly identified what

Chomsky believes makes the Grammaire ‘Cartesian’, the idea that the Grammaire first applied

the ‘Cartesian’ insights they mention to language are dubious.

Both, however, misidentify precisely what Chomsky must have seen in the Grammaire and other

Port-Royal work. He sees in the ‘Cartesian’ (actually, Aspects-like) contributions the initiation

of a natural science. No one doubts that the Grammaire had precedents; Chomsky emphasizes as

much (97n.67;134n.67). But plausibly Lancelot and Arnauld – and perhaps especially Arnauld –

launched a novel project that puts a different cast on – for example – the Grammaire’s view of

the role of something like Aspects’ Deep Structures. In the Grammaire and before, something

like them are introduced as explanations. But what sort of explanations? Arnauld, who honored

Descartes’s method, gave these explanations a then-novel cast. They became natural science

explanations.

Lakoff in her effort to attribute ‘Cartesian’ insights to Sanctius and before focuses on Lancelot

and ignores Arnauld and his contribution. Chomsky in CL, however, notes (35f.;) that some of

the Grammaire’s more important claims concerning how ‘hidden’ structures explain a person’s

understanding of a sentence (where heard forms do not) are expressed in the same way or more
fully in the Logique that Arnauld published with Nicole two years later. Plausibly, it was

Arnauld, not Lancelot, who contributed to the Grammaire the clear explanation of differences in

understandings of restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses. He did so by appeal, ultimately

(Chomsky indicates), to an introduced or hypothesized theoretical primitive, the notion of an

‘idea’ with its intension and extension (97-8n.70;134-5n.70). Given the fact that Arnauld

corresponded with and appeared friendly with Descartes plus the acknowledged degree to which

Descartes’s early Rules played a role in the Logique, and given further that the Discourse’s four

rules compress the earlier Rules and also yield much of the method of natural science research, it

is plausible that Arnauld’s contribution to the Grammaire served to initiate a natural science of

language. He could have been unaware that he had launched the study of language on a path

different from anything offered before, yielding – eventually – formalized

computational/derivational sciences of internal mental ‘modules’.7 But it is still plausible that he

did.

What about Salmon? After Descartes, there was what amounted to a test for a natural science of

mind: a candidate must show evidence of adopting a rationalist research strategy and provide

some indication that it can progress towards satisfying the desiderata of natural science research.

Someone who declares that they have a science of language on offer – such as the speculative

grammarian Campanella that Salmon mentions (1969: 172-3) as among those who anticipated

the Grammaire’s insights on universality – might be able to meet this test. Being influenced by

Galileo (if he was) would not be enough; his efforts would have to indicate that he was in some

7
Descartes might have anticipated something of this sort. In the Optics and elsewhere he noted
that ocular convergence yielded visual depth, and pointed out that the blind can approximate
such calculations by using converging sticks. Descartes had available the rudiments of a
computational science of vision. For discussion, see part III of my introduction to CL’s third
edition.
way committed to internalist and nativist assumptions. If his efforts cannot meet the test, the

Grammaire did (due to Arnauld) initiate a distinctively Cartesian linguistics.

It is of course obvious that the Grammaire, even if supplemented with the contributions of

Beauzée and Du Marsais, was not by the standards of natural science a great success. Chomsky

points out the failings – among them, being insufficiently explanatory in what we can see as a

natural science way (57-8;96-7). We can see them even more clearly now, because we can also

see the failings of Aspects and its Deep Structures too – what Chomsky had achieved by 1966,

and his object of comparison. But the failings that Chomsky lists in CL – and other failings

mentioned below – do not challenge my primary point. The novelty lay in beginning to conceive

of the science of language as a rationalist form of natural science of mind. Linguistics could not

be Cartesian until after Descartes and some evidence that his methods and observations (and

their implications) affected the work of grammarians.

Another problem with the Grammaire was that while it anticipated a solution, it did not deal

adequately with the creative aspect of language use observations – another of Descartes’s

contributions to the science of language, even if he did not fully realize their implications. But

we know that only in hindsight. We now know that the only plausible way to deal with the

creativity observations is to ensure that language proper (as opposed to its use) is captured by a

theory of the operations of a modular internal system that is not creative as such itself, but that

can yield an indefinitely large number of understandable (though not necessarily usable)

sententially-expressed ‘perspectives.’ As pointed out, there is no science of creative language

use, only of an isolated generative system that makes creative use by people possible.
I should mention that taking creativity into account has important consequences for the

discussions of language and mind in the 17th century, and before and since. Since it is people

who think and reason (typically using language to do so), there is no natural science of thinking

and reasoning. The right way to look at the matter is to see language as making linguistically

expressed thought possible. The reader can easily draw the implications for the unexamined

assumption – exhibited in the work of the majority from Aristotle to Descartes and beyond – that

the right way to look for universal principles on which to base a theory of language or mind is to

look to reason, thought, and logic. The creativity observations demand a view of language and

mind that breaks with a long tradition.

Nor did the Grammaire adequately deal with Descartes’s poverty of the stimulus observations

(and related cluster of observations). They too are dealt with properly only by recent work on

evolution and development (evo-devo), in ways only now beginning to be explored. But its

assumption of generality and a rationalist research strategy anticipated a solution.

III. Conclusion

It is only recently that linguistics has come to deal fully with Descartes’s contributions to the

study of mind and language. Nevertheless, the Grammaire apparently did start something new

and Cartesian. In depicting the beginnings of a rationalist and naturalistic science of language,

Cartesian Linguistics is aptly named.