Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (review)

Noam Chomsky’s Cartesian linguistics( CL) was originally published in 1966 (New York: Harper & Row) and was preceded by four versions of his plenary session address to the 1962 Ninth International Congress of Linguists (ICL). The four versions are: (i) ‘The logical basis of linguistic theory’, Preprints of papers for the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, ed. by Morris Halle, 509–74, Cambridge, MA: Morris Halle, 1962; (ii) ‘The logical basis of linguistic theory’, Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, ed. by Horace G. Lunt, 914–78, The Hague: Mouton, 1964; (iii) ‘Current issues in linguistic theory’, The structure of language, ed. by Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz, 50–118, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964; and (iv) Current issues in linguistic theory, The Hague: Mouton, 1964. Each version of the ICL paper incorporates increasingly lengthy and more detailed discussion of pre-twentieth-century views of linguistic creativity and the innate principles of mind that make language acquisition possible. These are the concepts that form the central themes of CL, which editor James McGilvray here calls ‘one of the most original and profound studies of language and mind in the 20th century’ (7).

Chomsky’s presentations and interpretations of the ideas of René Descartes and of other rationalist and romanticist philosophers and writers (such as Géraud de Cordemoy, Ralph Cudworth, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Wilhelm von Humboldt) brought to the attention of linguists in the 1960s an intellectual history that had been largely ignored during an extended period of ahistoricism in twentieth-century American academic life (for discussion see Julia S. Falk’s ‘Turn to the history of linguistics: Noam Chomsky and Charles Hockett in the 1960s’, Historiographia Linguistica30.129–85, 2003). CLand the earlier ICL papers led to a surge of American interest in the history of linguistic concepts and ideas, and it provoked some hostile critiques and misinterpretations (e.g. ‘The history of linguistics and Professor Chomsky’, by Hans Aarsleff, Language46.570–85, 1970; see the rejoinder to Aarsleff by Harry M. Bracken, ‘Chomsky’s Cartesianism’, Language Sciences22.11–17, October 1972). McGilvray has chosen to ‘not discuss the reviews here’ (40, n.1), but he does attempt to explain the ‘prominence of René Descartes’ name in the book’s title’ (8), which was one source of controversy among reviewers.

McGilvray’s introduction (7–44) is ‘organized in terms of a distinction between rationalist and empiricist approaches to mind that Chomsky suggests but does not pursue in CL’ (7), taking up the topics of linguistic creativity, rationalist-romantic efforts to deal with such creativity, and the place of nativism and of contemporary forms of empiricism and rationalism in the study of mind. The main sections of CLitself are: ‘Creative aspect of language use’ (51–71), ‘Deep and surface structure’ (72–87), ‘Description and explanation in linguistics’ (88–93), and ‘Acquisition and use of language’ (94–103); there are also extensive notes (105–41) and a bibliography (143–50) that combines the original references and those added by the editor.

Chomsky begins and ends his text with commentary on a remark by Alfred North Whitehead: ‘A brief, and sufficiently accurate, description of the intellectual life of the European races during the succeeding two centuries and a quarter up to our own times is that they have been living upon the accumulated capital of ideas provided for them by the genius of the seventeenth century’ ( CL, 1st edn., p. xvi). The quotation itself was left out of the new edition, but, according to the editor, it is included in later printings.

In the first edition of CLmany quotations appeared in their original French or German, and McGilvray suggests that this diminished the impact of the book. However, in the United States this is unlikely since at the time of its publication virtually all linguistics programs...