Reception and Developments
Chomsky accomplished his research for Cartesian Linguistics while he was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies; thereafter a great deal of subject matter was presented at the Christian Gauss seminars at Princeton University in 1965. Since the publication of Cartesian Linguistics, Chomsky's history has been criticized as an artificial predecessor to his own ideas, mainly formulated in the context of 1950s psychological behaviorism.
Despite the large amounts of criticism Chomsky defended the validity of his conception by replying to critics and also by elaborating further his historical perspective. The book has been reedited by James McGilvray in 2002 and 2009 with only minor changes and lengthy introductions. New reviews invariably point to previous criticism which has been left unanswered, suggesting that the introductory essays also fail to convince.
The main objection to the book's argument bears on the point that for his "Cartesian linguistics" Chomsky relies mostly on the Port-Royal grammar and not on Descartes' writings. However the Grammar is not Cartesian in any interesting sense. The whole discussion has been succinctly summarised already in 1969: "Professor Chomsky may wish to cling to the term "Cartesian linguistics" for reasons not fully explicit in his book, although his remarks on the use of such a label suggest that he means simply "rationalist linguistics." But if he wishes to include under his label the Cartesian notion of language as species-specific to man, and the notion of underlying structures (which I argue is not Cartesian in origin), as well as the general rational approach, he can do no better than to use the term "Port-Royal linguistics,"
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