A Case Against the Chomskyan Linguistic Cult

The Chomskyan revolution began as an intellectual rebellion and ended as a paradigm. Noam Chomsky’s critique of behaviourism transformed twentieth-century linguistics by rejecting the idea that linguistic competence could be adequately explained through environmental learning and by locating the decisive causes of language within the biological organisation of the human organism. Yet the subsequent history of Universal Grammar presents a Kuhnian paradox: the theory that helped overthrow one scientific orthodoxy gradually became an orthodoxy of its own. Across successive transformations from transformational grammar and Principles and Parameters to Minimalism and Merge, the specifically innate content attributed to the human language faculty became increasingly abstract and economical. Controversies surrounding linguistic universals, recursion, Pirahã, statistical learning and cross-linguistic diversity consequently raise a difficult question: does this history represent the progressive refinement of a successful scientific programme, or the preservation of its central nativist commitment through continual theoretical retreat? The provocative expression “Chomskyan linguistic cult” is used here not to describe generative linguistics literally as a religious cult, but as a metaphor for the institutional, philosophical and paradigmatic protection that can develop around a revolutionary scientific framework once its assumptions become intertwined with disciplinary authority and a culturally powerful conception of human nature. The deeper argument of this article is that the persistence of the Chomskyan paradigm cannot be understood exclusively as a technical controversy about grammar. Linguistic innateness preserves an attractive image of Homo sapiens as possessing a privileged interior capacity that precedes and constrains cultural experience. Although Chomsky’s theory is biological rather than spiritual, this conception occupies some of the philosophical territory historically assigned to soul, reason and autonomous mind. Large Language Models now disturb that image by demonstrating that statistical prediction can generate sophisticated linguistic behaviour without a human biological language faculty. Following Elan Barenholtz’s conception of LLMs as mirrors, the resulting shock can be reversed: instead of asking why machines lack the depth supposedly hidden behind human language, it becomes necessary to ask why prediction can reproduce so many linguistic signs through which that depth has traditionally been inferred. Ayolov’s Miscommunication Trilogy and The Planned Obsolescence of Language extend this reversal into a more radical hypothesis. Language may not be the timeless expression of an innate human essence but a comparatively recent cultural technology imposed upon an evolutionarily older prelinguistic organism, progressively reorganising cognition, identity and social organisation while creating the illusion that the linguistic self is the original author of its own words. Artificial intelligence marks a decisive threshold because language can now reproduce outside its original biological host. The post-Chomskyan question is therefore no longer simply how language exists inside humanity, but what language has done to humanity since humanity acquired it. In this reversal lies the possibility of a new paradigm: from language as human essence towards language as historically contingent technology, and eventually from linguistic civilisation towards the possibility of its planned obsolescence.