tabula rasaor bearer of a programme that merely needs to be unfolded, social
interaction plays only a secondary role (certainly more important in the case
of empiricism: even Frankenstein’s monster needs a family environment in
order to learn to speak). In the case of political or economic science, this
methodological individualism might have some justification (I am making
a desperate attempt to be ecumenical here). But, in the case of language, it
does not work: we enter into language, which pre-exists us and which we
have hardly any purchase on. The English language is not the result of a
composition of individual decisions or positions and, in the case of language,
the metaphor of the invisible hand does not apply. This is what is expressed
by the concept of system in Saussure and of structure among structuralists:
they involve conceptualising a necessity (which is imposed on each speaker),
but a socialnecessity, by position [thesei] – i.e. by a form of convention – and
not a natural necessity [phusei].^9 In this respect, Chomsky, for whom language
is unquestionably a natural organ and linguistics a natural science, is neither
Saussurian nor structuralist.
If we abandon the standpoint of the individual and regard language as a
social, collective phenomenon, the individual gradient becomes irrelevant.
The individual speaker is interpellated by language (by which I mean the
natural language that is her mother tongue). She therefore has the capacity
to receive this interpellation in the mode of the always-already (just as she
has the ability to learn to swim or ride a bicycle). These capacities are employed
in collective human practices. The phrase ‘innate ideas’ in fact treats the brain
as a mysterious entity: a materialist position will treat it as a material organ
like the hand, whose development accompanies and induces the development
of the human species. The same relationship obtains between the brain and
language as between the hand and technique. Stone-cutting is not innate;
neither is speech.
All this is highly abstract. The touchstone of Chomsky’s theory is its ability
to explain phenomena. My claim is that it does not. I shall mention two
examples – one semantic, the other syntactical.
Chomsky suggests that in the following utterance we immediately understand
that what is painted brown is the outside, not the inside, of the house:
24 • Chapter Two
(^9) On this point, readers are referred to Milner 2002.