Reflections on Noam Chomsky’s Galilean Linguistics

The metaphysical assumption that nature is perfect has been one of the foundations of modern physics since the 17th century. Because of the success of this discipline, researchers in other fields of knowledge have followed its principles, including the idea that nature is perfect. A fascinating case of this epistemological transposition occurred in the 20th century with Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, especially in his Minimalist Program. In it, Chomsky takes to its ultimate consequences what he called ‘the Galilean intuition that “nature is perfect,”’ proposing that language is also perfect. Since it is also assumed in generativism that language is a biological system, the conjecture that it is perfect results in the highly improbable wager that it is unique from a biological point of view. This is because, being the result of evolutionary accidents, biological systems are characteristically imperfect. Given this almost paradoxical situation reached in Chomsky’s minimalism, I argue in this paper that it makes no sense to adopt the metaphysical assumption that language is perfect. I also suggest that a parallel architecture model of language such as Ray Jackendoff’s seems to have a good chance of becoming the main research program of biolinguistics because it is more consistent with the typical features of a mental system such as language than Chomsky’s minimalism.