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In an era of intellectual self-effacement and species-doubt, this statement is often taken to be the quintessential philosophical expression of anthropomorphic arrogance. As if humans are so importantly different in the order of nature! As if the human meaning as manifest in the mind could be a separate substance from the world! As if the mind could construct the world from some inner source through a process of human meaning-ascription! As if there could be a single rationality that might be good for all persons, notwithstanding their irreducible diversity! For better or for worse, Descartes has become a postmodern scandal, or at least the version of him presented in convenient caricature.^§MS1.3a

Noam Chomsky concurs with the Descartes of caricature, that the mind is an innate source of reason, not learned experience.¹⁰⁶ Linguistics is a self-examination of the cogito. In Chomsky’s terms, the deep structures of reasoning, available only to humans as a species, account for the creative aspect of language, or the capacity of these structures to generate an infinite number of utterances. Descartes, Chomsky says approvingly, had already pointed this out in the seventeenth century. Language is infinite, even if its underlying rules are reducible to a few.¹⁰⁷

Following Descartes, Chomsky’s aim is to “shift the main burden of explanation from the structure of the world to the structure of the mind.”¹⁰⁸ He says that this creative aspect of language use is “both unbounded in scope and stimulus-free.”¹⁰⁹ To be “stimulus-free” – this is a remarkable riposte to Skinner^§MS3.1.2d about the sources of language.

To shift the meaning of things exclusively to the structure of the mind – this is a remarkably one-sided simplification of meaning in human experience. Or, to return to our notion of ontology,^§MS3.1 when it comes to meaning, Chomsky says that ideal structures of meaning are for all practical purposes disconnected from the material, which has no meaning without them.

We concede, with Chomsky, that the ideal structures of meaning can exceed the material. But we also want to say that this exceeding can happen in image^§MS3.1.2b and other forms of meaning as profoundly as it does in speech – which is why we move beyond linguistics and into a multimodal grammar. And, with the behaviorists, we want to say the material structures of meaning are in a minimally co-determining relation with ideal or mental structures, and that to the extent that many of its meanings are as yet unknown. In the scope of knowability, the material also exceeds the ideal.

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¹⁰⁶ Noam Chomsky, 1964, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 48–49.

¹⁰⁷ Noam Chomsky, 1980 [2005], Rules and Representations, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 220.

¹⁰⁸ Noam Chomsky, 1976, Reflections on Language, London, UK: Fontana, p. 6.

¹⁰⁹ Noam Chomsky, 1966 [2009], Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 60.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 293–294. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

René Descartes’ “Cogito” §MS3.1.2g