Caint i gCÓBAC | Talk at UCD, Ireland

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From thesis to book projects:

Kant and the History of Linguisitcs

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Keywords: Kant, Chomsky, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Language, Mind, Imagination

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Wilhelm von Humboldt’s aphorism ‘infinite use of finite means’ was core to the original proposal. Chomsky famously adopted this idea for his own programme in linguistics which sought to develop a formal response to two key observations: the rapidity with which we acquire languages and the creative (infinite) ways in which we use them. Since the environment cannot account for how this is possible, Chomsky argued we need to turn inward and develop a theory as to how formal rules/principles might engender but not wholly account for how creative use is possible. As we know, Chomsky suggested this was computational. What was finite were the rules/principles of mind/brain that he describes as the Faculty of Language, what is infinite are the amount of sentences that can be produced – this he claimed was an updated version of Humboldt’s original insight and more powerful because of the tools that had become available through progress made in foundational mathematics by Post, Turing and Gödel. 

Humbodltian scholars have by and large rejected Chomsky’s connections with Humboldt but in the thesis it was shown that Chomsky and Humboldt really are talking along similar lines when it comes to a study of Language and mind. Humboltians claim that when Humboldt used the term ‘infinite use of finite means’ he meant all that could be thought – but Humboldt was explicit, all that can be thought (conceptualised) can only be constructed through the sentence, Language (as a formal capacity) is the ‘formative organ of thought’ (1999: 54). And Chomsky believes that Language as a function of the mind/brain is to enable conceptualised thinking with communication an ‘ancillary benefit’ (2016). 

The claim that by using Humboldt in this way Chomsky places Kantian ideas at the heart of his genealogy Cartesian Linguistics (1966/2009) is reinforced by an examination of Humboldt’s Kantian heritage and his belief that the Kantian problem of how sensibility and understanding are unified in experience is resolved by seeing Language as the creative/imaginative interface that brings them together. 

This analysis of Humboldt allowed us to provide an analysis of Kant and how he would fit within Chomsky’s genealogy. I examined his thoughts on the productive imagination in the Critiques (Reason & Judgement), his Anthropology and most importantly his Lectures on Logic (1992) which portray the importance of languages and their following rules of mind.   

Whereas the dissertation focused on conceptual similarities between Kant, Humboldt and Chomsky by placing Kant under Chomsky’s method of rational reconstruction the book project focuses on homologies in thought from Kant to Chomsky and employs several methods from historical reconstruction as used in linguistic historiography to these ends. 

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