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.