Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

For it is a very remarkable fact that there are no men so dull-witted and stupid, not
even madmen, that they are incapable of stringing together different words, and
composing them into utterances, through which they let their thoughts be known.
(Descartes, 2006, p. 47)
Modern linguists describe this as the creative aspect of language (Chomsky, 1965,
1966). “An essential property of language is that it provides the means for expressing
indefinitely many thoughts and for reacting appropriately in an indefinite range of
new situations” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 6).
While Descartes did not write a great deal about language specifically
(Chomsky, 1966), it is clear that he was sympathetic to the notion that language was
the medium for thought. This is because he used the creative aspect of language to
argue in favor of dualism. Inspired by the automata that were appearing in Europe
in his era, Descartes imagined the possibility of having to prove that sophisticated
future devices were not human. He anticipated the Turing test (Turing, 1950) by
more than three centuries by using language to separate man from machine.
For we can well conceive of a machine made in such a way that it emits words,
and even utters them about bodily actions which bring about some corresponding
change in its organs . . . but it is not conceivable that it should put these words
in different orders to correspond to the meaning of things said in its presence.
(Descartes, 2006, p. 46)
Centuries later, similar arguments still appear in philosophy. For instance, why is a
phonograph recording of someone’s entire life of speech an inadequate simulation
of that speech (Fodor, 1968b)? “At the very best, phonographs do what speakers do,
not what speakers can do” (p. 129).
Why might it be impossible for a device to do what speakers can do? For Descartes,
language-producing machines were inconceivable because machines were physical
and therefore finite. Their finite nature made it impossible for them to be infinitely
variable.
Although such machines might do many things as well or even better than any of
us, they would inevitably fail to do some others, by which we would discover that
they did not act consciously, but only because their organs were disposed in a certain
way. (Descartes, 2006, pp. 46–47)
In other words, the creativity of thought or language was only possible in the infinite,
nonphysical, disembodied mind.
It is this conclusion of Descartes’ that leads to a marked distinction between
Cartesian philosophy and classical cognitive science. Classical cognitive science
embraces the creative aspect of language. However, it views such creativity from
a materialist, not a dualist, perspective. Developments in logic and in computing
that have occurred since the seventeenth century have produced a device that
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