L’usage chomskyen de l’innéisme cartésien

The article purports to study the Chomskyan use of the reference to Descartes’s philosophy. Since the 1950’s, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky suggests to replace nativism to the front of the stage with his hypothesis of an innate faculty of language. As says the unequivocal title of his book, The Cartesian Linguistics, he falls within a Cartesian tradition. As such, he institutes a strong link between contemporary nativism and Cartesian nativism. The article aims at exploring the Chomskyan use of Cartesian reference. Is what Chomsky calls “innate faculty” similar to what Descartes calls “innate idea” ? According to some commentators, Chomskyan use of Descartes is mainly rhetorical. First, the naturalistic turn undertaken during the XXth century has displaced the reflexion on the mind from a metaphysical a priori level to a scientific empiristic level. According to this perspective, Cartesian ideas and Chomskyan innate principles are very different: the ones are explicit, conscious and necessary whereas the others are implicit, unconscious and infrarational. Second, Descartes has mainly ignored the main domain of Chomsky’s interest: language. Even if Descartes gives an important place to language, he considers language acquisition as a trivial problem, compared to knowledge acquisition. Finally, the uniform Cartesian mind seems to be incompatible with specific innate faculties. The article argues on the contrary that Chomskyan use of Descartes reveals a truly family resemblance between Chomskyan nativism and Cartesian nativism. First, this is because Chomsky predicates a priori principles that he feels close to the Cartesian theory of innate idea. Cartesian innateness and Chomskyan innateness mean both the logical anteriority of principles that condition knowledge acquisition. Then, Chomsky draws a rationalist tradition that holds the universality of grammatical structures in the name of the universality of fundamental distinctive characters of human Cartesian mind. In fact, Descartes and Chomsky can be both seen as defending the existence of innate mental dispositions. Thus, what links Chomsky to Descartes is not the universal innate grammar, that Descartes would have probably rejected, but a similar way of raising the problem of knowledge acquisition and then of solving it.