by Noam Chomsky
Descartes’s theory of cognition is clearly summarized in his Comments on a Certain Broadsheet (1648):
. . .if we bear well in mind the scope of our senses and what it is exactly that reaches our faculty of thinking by way of them, we must admit that in no case are the ideas of things presented to us by the senses just as we form them in our thinking. So much so that there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience, such as the fact that we judge this or that idea which we now have immediately before our mind refers to a certain thing situated outside us. We make such a judgement not because these things transmit the ideas to our mind through the sense organs, but because they transmit something which, at exactly that moment, gives the mind occasion to form these ideas by means of the faculty innate to it. Nothing reaches our mind from external objects through the sense organs except certain corporeal motions . . . But neither the motions themselves nor the figures arising from them are conceived by us exactly as they occur in the sense organs . . . Hence it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate in us. The ideas of pain, colours, sounds, and the like must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions. Is it possible to imagine anything more absurd than that all the common notions within our mind arise from such motions and cannot exist without them? I would like our author to tell me what the corporeal motion is that is capable of forming some common notion to the effect that ‘things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other’, or any other he cares to take. For all such motions are particular, whereas the common notions are universal and bear no affinity with, or relation to, the motions.
(CSM I, 304–305)
Rather similar ideas are developed at length by Cudworth.116 He distinguished the essentially passive faculty of sense from the active and innate “cognoscitive powers” whereby men (and men alone) “are enabled to understand or judge of what is received from without by sense.” This cognoscitive power is not a mere storehouse of ideas, but “a power of raising intelligible ideas and conceptions of things from within itself” (p. 425; Cudworth 1996: 75). The function of sense is “the offering or presenting of some object to the mind, to give it an occasion to exercise its own activity upon.” Thus, for example, when we look into the street and perceive men walking, we are relying, not merely on sense (which shows us at most surfaces – i.e., hats and clothes – and, in fact, not even objects), but on the exercise of the understanding, applied to the data of sense (pp. 409–410; Cudworth 1996: 57–59).117 The “intelligible forms by which things are understood or known, are not stamps or impressions passively printed upon the soul from without, but ideas vitally protended or actively exerted from within itself.” Thus prior knowledge and set play a large role in determining what we see (e.g., a familiar face in a crowd) (pp. 423–424; Cudworth 1996: 74). It is because we use intellectual ideas in perception “that those knowledges which are more abstract and remote from matter, are more accurate, intelligible and demonstrable, – than those which are conversant about concrete and material things,” as Aristotle has observed (p. 427; Cudworth 1996: 78).118 This claim is illustrated by a discussion of our conceptions of geometrical figures (pp. 455f.; Cudworth 1996: 103ff.). Obviously every sensed triangle is irregular, and if there were a physically perfect one, we could not detect this by sense; “and every irregular and imperfect triangle [is] as perfectly that which it is, as the most perfect triangle.” Our judgments regarding external objects in terms of regular figures, our very notion of “regular figure” therefore have their source in the “rule, pattern and exemplar” which are generated by the mind as an “anticipation.” The concept of a triangle or of a “regular proportionate and symmetrical figure” is not taught but “springs originally from nature itself,” as does, in general, the human concept of “pulchritude and deformity in material objects”; nor can the a priori truths of geometry be derived from sense. And it is only by means of these “inward ideas” produced by its “innate cognoscitive power” that the mind is able to “know and understand all external individual things” (p. 482; Cudworth 1996: 101–128 passim).
Descartes had discussed the same question in very similar terms, in his Reply to Objections V:
Hence, when in our childhood we first happened to see a triangular figure drawn on paper, it cannot have been this figure that showed us how we should conceive of the true triangle studied by geometers, since the true triangle is contained in the figure only in the way in which a statue of Mercury is contained in a rough block of wood. But since the idea of the true triangle was already in us, and could be conceived by our mind more easily than the more composite figure of the triangle drawn on paper, when we saw the composite figure we did not apprehend the figure we saw, but rather the true triangle.
(CSM II, 262)
For Cudworth, the interpretation of sensory data in terms of objects and their relations, in terms of cause and effect, the relations of whole and part, symmetry, proportion, the functions served by objects and the characteristic uses to which they are put (in the case of all “things artificial” or “compounded natural things”), moral judgments, etc., is the result of the organizing activity of the mind (pp. 433f.; Cudworth 1996: 83–100). The same is true of the unity of objects (or, for example, of a melody); sense is like a “narrow telescope” that provides only piecemeal and successive views, but only the mind can give “one comprehensive idea of the whole” with all its parts, relations, proportions, and Gestalt qualities. It is in this sense that we speak of the intelligible idea of an object as not “stamped or impressed upon the soul from without, but upon occasion of the sensible idea excited and exerted from the inward active and comprehensive power of the intellect itself” (p. 439; Cudworth 1996: 91).119
Ideas of this sort regarding perception were common in the seventeenth century but were then swept aside by the empiricist current, to be revived again by Kant and the romantics.120 Consider, for example, Coleridge’s remarks on active processes in perception:
Instances in which a knowledge given to the mind quickens and invigorates the faculties by which such knowledge is attainable independently cannot have escaped the most ordinary observer, and this is equally true whether it be faculties of the mind or of the senses . . . It is indeed wonderful both how small a likeness will suffice a full apprehension of sound or sight when the correspondent sound or object is foreknown and foreimagined and how small a deviation or imperfection will render the whole confused and indistinguishable or mistaken where no such previous intimation has been received. Hence all unknown languages appear to a foreigner to be spoken by the natives with extreme rapidity and to those who are but beginning to understand it with a distressing indistinction.121
Does nature present objects to us without exciting any act on our part, does she present them under all circumstances perfect and as it were ready made? Such may be the notion of the most unthinking . . . not only must we have some scheme or general outline of the object to which we could determine to direct our attention, were it only to have the power of recognizing it . . .122
It is, once again, with Humboldt that these ideas are applied most clearly to the perception and interpretation of speech. He argues that there is a fundamental difference between the perception of speech and the perception of unarticulated sound (cf. note 38). For the latter, “an animal’s sensory capacity” would suffice. But human speech perception is not merely a matter of “mere mutual evocation of the sound and the object indicated” (Verschiedenheit, p. 70; Humboldt 1999: 57). For one thing, a word is not “an impression of the object in itself, but rather of its image, produced in the soul” (p. 74). But, furthermore, speech perception requires an analysis of the incoming signal in terms of the underlying elements that function in the essent
ially creative act of speech production, and therefore it requires the activation of the generative system that plays a role in production of speech as well, since it is only in terms of these fixed rules that the elements and their relations are defined. The underlying “rules of generation” must, therefore, function in speech perception. If it were not for its mastery of these, if it were not for its ability “to actualize every possibility” the mind would no more be able to deal with the mechanisms of articulated speech than a blind man is able to perceive colors. It follows, then, that both the perceptual mechanisms and the mechanisms of speech production must make use of the underlying system of generative rules. It is because of the virtual identity of this underlying system in speaker and hearer that communication can take place, the sharing of an underlying generative system being traceable, ultimately, to the uniformity of human nature (cf. pp. 101–102 above and note 115). In brief,
There can be nothing present in the soul, save by one’s own activity, and understanding and speaking are but different effects of this power of speech. Conversing together is never comparable with a transfer of material. In the understander, as in the speaker, the same thing must be developed from the inner power of each; and what the former receives is merely the harmoniously attuning stimulus . . . In this way language in its entirety resides in every human being, which means, however, nothing else but that everyone possesses an urge governed by a specifically modified, limiting and confining power, to bring forth gradually the whole of language from within himself, or when brought forth to understand it, as outer or inner occasion may determine.
But understanding could not, as we have just found, be based upon inner spontaneity, and communal speech would have to be something other than mere mutual arousal of the hearer’s speech capacity, did not the diversity of individuals harbor the unity of human nature, fragmented only into separate individualities.
(p. 70; Humboldt 1999: 57 [with modifications])
Even in the case of perception of a single word, an underlying system of generative rules must be activated. It would be inaccurate, Humboldt maintains, to suppose that speaker and hearer share a store of clear and totally formed concepts. Rather, the perceived sound incites the mind to generate a corresponding concept by its own means:
[People] do not understand one another by actually exchanging signs for things, nor by mutually occasioning one another to produce exactly and completely the same concept; they do it by touching in one another the same link in the chain of their sensory ideas and internal conceptualizations, by striking the same note on their mental instrument, whereupon matching but not identical concepts are engendered in each.
(p. 213; Humboldt 1999: 152)
In short, speech perception requires internal generation of a representation both of the signal and the associated semantic content.
Contemporary research in perception has returned to the investigation of the role of internally represented schemata or models123 and has begun to elaborate the somewhat deeper insight that it is not merely a store of schemata that function in perception but rather a system of fixed rules for generating such schemata.124 In this respect too, it would be quite accurate to describe current work as a continuation of the tradition of Cartesian linguistics and the psychology that underlies it.
Summary
Returning to the remark of Whitehead’s that initiated this discussion, 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.
It is important to bear in mind that the survey that has been presented here is a very fragmentary and therefore in some ways a misleading one. Certain major figures – Kant, for example – have not been mentioned or have been inadequately discussed, and a certain distortion is introduced by the organization of this survey, as a projection backwards of certain ideas of contemporary interest rather than as a systematic presentation of the framework within which these ideas arose and found their place. Thus similarities have been stressed and divergences and conflicts overlooked. Still, even such a fragmentary survey as this does indicate, it seems to me, that the discontinuity of development in linguistic theory has been quite harmful to it and that a careful examination of classical linguistic theory, with its accompanying theory of mental processes, may prove to be an enterprise of considerable value.
Notes
INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION
1 Juan Huarte near the end of the sixteenth century (see Chomsky’s note 9) had remarked on linguistic creativity, but did not recognize its implications for the scientific study of mind in the way Descartes did.
The creativity that Chomsky is concerned with in Cartesian Linguistics is not that found in the sciences, for two reasons. One is that Cartesian Linguistics focuses on creativity in use, and scientists at work generally try to regulate the ways they use technical terms. This difference is significant; I comment on it below.
Second, Cartesian Linguistics’ creativity rests on concepts already available – typically innate. Scientific creativity involves the invention of new theories and, through them, new concepts. Chomsky’s own scientific work is an example. He virtually created linguistics in its modern form when he abandoned the ill-motivated project of descriptive taxonomy characteristic of much of linguistics when he began – a project where the ‘scientist’ is, as Vaugelas in Cartesian Linguistics claims, “simply a witness” who cannot justify his or her descriptive ‘tools’ – and initiated another project. That project consisted of constructing and improving what Chomsky now calls a “computational” science, a formal study of the biological ‘mechanisms’ by which languages are acquired and sentences put together.
2 In a debate with Michel Foucault on Dutch television in 1970 (in transcript form in Elders 1974: 143) Chomsky describes his interest in the texts of historical figures such as Descartes and Newton in this way: “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 love
r 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.”
3 Descartes presents an interesting case. For anyone who wants to pursue the issue, Part III of this introduction focuses on his contributions. One of the puzzles: among his many contributions, Descartes offered the rudiments of a computational theory of vision. It is not obvious why he did not take the (limited, of course) success of this theory as an indication that various other mental operations might be captured by another kind of computational theory. The Port-Royal grammarians who followed him attempted to construct such a theory for language, and for their time made considerable progress.
