The Exile of Grammar: 3 Anti-Darwin and the Denial of Emergence

When evolution is treated as irrelevant

Building on the Platonic ideal of grammar and the Cartesian isolation of mind, Chomsky’s linguistic framework introduces a third over-closure: the anti-Darwinian assumption that Universal Grammar (UG) is genetically fixed and species-specific. This move treats evolution, social interaction, and emergent pressures as largely irrelevant to the structure and acquisition of language.

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1. UG as Genetically Fixed

Within this perspective:

• UG is treated as a pre-specified, innate system.

• Parameters are species-specific and largely immutable.

• The child’s environment serves only to “trigger” the system, not shape it.

Language acquisition becomes a mechanical unfolding of pre-ordained structures, insulated from relational contingencies.

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2. Social and Evolutionary Pressures as Peripheral

From this frame, pressures that are central to the evolution of communication are bracketed:

• Social negotiation and interaction are treated as secondary stimuli.

• Cultural variation is largely a reflection of parameter setting, not emergent adaptation.

• Adaptive pressures that shape communicative forms are considered irrelevant to competence.

This is another exile of relation: language as it occurs in social life is no longer constitutive of grammar itself.

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3. Refusal to Account for Emergence

Relationally, this mirrors the over-closure we have seen in mathematics and physics:

• In physics, singularities and infinities signal over-applied formal closure.

• In mathematics, Platonic abstraction signals formal over-commitment.

• In linguistics, anti-Darwinian UG signals closure against relational and evolutionary emergence.

In each case, phenomena that arise from relational, historical, or contingent processes are treated as external or anomalous.

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4. Consequences for Linguistic Theory

The anti-Darwinian assumption generates persistent explanatory gaps:

• Why do languages vary across cultures and epochs if UG is fixed?

• Why do children acquire language in socially contingent ways?

• Why do linguistic innovations spread and stabilise if the system is innate?

All of these appear as puzzles because the model has pre-emptively excluded the relational and emergent dimensions.

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5. The Pattern of Over-Closure

Taken together, the three closures in Chomskyan theory—Platonic grammar, Cartesian mind, anti-Darwinian fixity—create a pattern analogous to what we have seen in other sciences:

• Stabilisation within a formal system provides predictive power.

• Isolation from context produces anomalies and “hard problems.”

• Closure masquerades as ontology, leading to persistent explanatory puzzles.

In short, UG’s structure is powerful but structurally blind to relational and emergent processes that are constitutive of language in practice.

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6. Looking Ahead

Having traced the formal, Cartesian, and anti-Darwinian closures, the next post will examine the hard problems of language—acquisition, variation, creativity, and use—as anomalies generated by these inherited cuts. These are not failures of nature, but signals of mislocated relational ontology within linguistic theory.