Caught Between an Empirical Rock and an Innate Hard Place

Abstract

This article explores the tension between the antithetical philosophies of empiricism and innatism underlying Chomskyan linguistics. It first follows the trail of empiricism in North American linguistics, starting from the work of Leonard Bloomfield at the beginning of the Twentieth century, and its influence on the Chomskyan paradigm, after which the Kantian trail of innatism initiated by Chomsky himself is reconnoitered. It is argued that the Chomskyan approach to natural language represents a paradigmatic example of the unsavory consequences of the divorce between mind and matter instituted by Kant, in particular because human language involves an intimate relation between both types of reality. In Chomsky’s Generative Grammar, on the other hand, the material side of language is treated as completely autonomous from its mental correlate and analyzed in terms of a priori conceptual structures and computational operations; for its part, the mental side of language is treated as innate; the relation between the two is thus made utterly obscure and incomprehensible. The conclusion of the article argues in favour of a more balanced approach inspired by Aristotelianism and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics.