The Creative Aspect of Chomsky's Use of the Notion of Creativity

Abstract

T he question raised by Noam Chomsky at the beginning of his Language and Mind, What contribution can the study of language make to our understanding of human nature? has, in one form or another, been at the forefront of his philosophical discussions of the last fifteen years or so.1 In his attempts to answer that question, a central role has been played by the concept of creativity-perhaps the single most influential concept in the Chomskyan revolution in psycholinguistics. It is the creativity of human language, so eloquently extolled by Chomsky and, in the eyes of his followers, decisively demonstrated by his generative-transformational linguistics, that he has repeatedly invoked in his campaign against behaviorism and in support of the dignity and uniqueness of man. Yet there must have been others over the years who, like myself, have wondered just what it was about human creativity that Chomsky's linguistics was supposed to have brought to light. My own puzzlement reached its height a few years ago with the publication of his Reflections on Language;2 there, in a chapter entitled Problems and Mysteries in the Study of Human Language, Chomsky distinguishes between two kinds of issues that arise in the study of language and mind: those that appear to be within the reach of approaches and concepts that are moderately well understood-what I will call 'problems'; and others that remain as obscure to us today as when they were originally formulated-what I will call 'mysteries) (p. 137). Among the problems, he classes questions of linguistic competence and of language acquisition; among the mys-