changed since its appearance at the dawn of humanity. Any historical
phenomenon, any linguistic change is superficial, and irrelevant for the
scientific study of the language faculty. Or, rather, there is linguistic change,
but only at the level of the individual whose competence passes from an
innate ‘initial state’ to a ‘steady state’, once parameters have been triggered
by the linguistic environment.
The transition from infancy in the etymological sense to articulate language
is therefore not effected by learning (or only at a superficial level); and the
sole temporality of language is the retrospective time of recollection. The
child who acquires (but does not learn) speech is like the slave in Meno: he
remembers what he had always known, but did not yet know that he knew.
Chomsky’s position at least possesses the merit of coherence in its idealism.
Later, we shall how or why it can combine a reductionist materialism and a
fanatical idealism.
The object of linguistic science is obviously (and this is not a criticism) not
language such as we use it, but an abstract construct, which Chomsky calls
I-language. The letter I is the initial of the three adjectives that characterise
language thus conceived: it is internal (there is at least one element that
Chomsky takes over from structuralism – the principle of immanence);
individual (language is not a social and cultural object); and intensional – a
term taken from logic – by which Chomsky means that the language object
he constructs is a generative grammar – that is, a limited number of principles
capable of generating an infinity of utterances (this is what Chomsky calls
the ‘discrete infinity’ characteristic of language).^8 The rest – i.e. language as
we use it – is consigned to ‘common sense’, as the object of what Chomsky
calls ‘folk-linguistics’ in all the senses of the term.
There is nothing objectionable about the idea that a science does not find
its object ready-made in the world, but constructs it, by abstraction, against
common-sense conceptions: the sun does not revolve around the earth and
popular etymology is a symptom, not an explanation, of the origin of words.
But on one condition: that the science thus deployed accounts for the
phenomena. In the domain of language, this means: on condition that the
22 • Chapter Two
(^8) An extensional definition enumerates the elements concerned; an intensional
definition supplies the rule of their collection.