alike. Otherwise you couldn’t learn any of them. The basic structure of them,
including the meaning of words and the nature of sentences, just has to
come from inside. You don’t have enough information to have all that
richness of knowledge.^7Readers will no doubt have noted the exaggeratedly assertive, and hence
imprudent, character of this position, which claims to know in advance what
research will discover (and we can anticipate that research will discover what
the researcher was determined to find at all costs), as well as the sole empirical
argument, endlessly repeated by Chomsky. According to this argument, what
he calls the ‘explosion of competence’ in a young child (who apparently learns
the language more rapidly than the information she receives from the outside
world can explain) can only be understood by postulating that the knowledge
comes ‘from inside’ – in other words, is innate. The problem with this kind
of argument (‘there is no other explanation for these phenomena than...’)
is that it has a history: it is the argument that founds the physico-theological
proof of the existence of God (the clock-world is too complex for there not
to be a watch-maker). No wonder that Chomsky is sometimes called a linguist
for creationists out of polemical spite.
If there is a single structure of language which is inscribed in our genetic
inheritance; and if all social or cultural differences are, from standpoint of
language, irrelevant, a second conclusion follows: each member of the human
species is identical as regards the faculty of language, because language is
inscribed in his or her brain. Language must therefore be studied in the
individual: we are no longer dealing with a system that is external to individual
speakers and independent of them (the central position of the linguistic
tradition, from Saussure to structuralism), but with a set of individuals endowed
with the same capacities; and language, at least as conceived by the science
of language, has nothing to do with social existence. In other words, the
logical consequence of Chomskyan naturalism is methodological individualism,
which is characteristic of liberal thinking in economics and politics.
And there is a third consequence. It is clear that language, derived from a
mutation that constituted the human species, has no history, or only the quasi-
frozen history of the evolution of the species over the very long term and by
leaps: human language has no history in the strict sense, since it cannot have
Critique of Linguistics • 21(^7) Chomsky 2001, p. 207.