A Philosophical Critique of Chomskyan Linguistics, Based on Wittgenstein's Views (Revised in 2026)

This thesis examines four commitments central to Chomskyan generative linguistics: I-language, innateness, mentalism, and naturalism. I first reconstruct the rationalist and naturalist background of these commitments and then ask what follows from treating language primarily as an internal computational system. The contrast throughout is with the later Wittgenstein, whose discussions of meaning and rule-following direct attention to use, practice, and forms of life. I do not argue that language lacks a biological basis, or that formal models fail to describe important structural regularities. The narrower problem concerns normativity: an account of internal states may explain causal or structural features of linguistic competence, but what makes one application of a rule correct and another mistaken? Wittgenstein's discussions of rule-following and private language provide the main framework for pursuing this question. I use them to criticize Chomskyan internalism without identifying I-language with the private language Wittgenstein discusses. The thesis ends by asking how linguistic theory can preserve the explanatory achievements of formal analysis while still accounting for the practices in which expressions are learned, used, corrected, and understood.