Steven Pinker on Combinatorial Grammar

'The Infinite Library' in Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999): Pinker argues that language is composed of a mental dictionary and a mental grammar of creative rules:

Combinatorial grammar allows us to talk about a combinatorial world, a world in which violets could be red or a man could bite a dog. Yet familiar objects and actions around us often form a noncombinatorial list of distinctive kinds. When we merely have to single out one of them, a combinatorial system is overkill. We never will have to refer to fish with an enmity to sheep or to military actions with scales and reddish flesh, and that's what a combinatorial system for words like Wilkins's allows us to do. To refer to everyday things it's easier to say dog or fish than to work through a complicated taxonomy that is just a fancy way of singling out dogs or fish anyway.

Exchange between John R Searle and Pinker on the book (June 2002).

Pinker: How can we explain these cavalier misreadings? For ten years Searle has insisted that he has a philosophical argument which proves that cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and linguistics are based on 'stunning mistakes'. The main mistake lies in analyzing mental phenomena as forms of information-processing.

Searle's three basic objections to Pinker's account are 1) 'an obsession with combinatorial grammar is not a defining feature of rationalism in its debate with empiricism'; 2) 'when [Pinker] does try to describe the essential difference between rationalism and empiricism he gets it wrong'; and 3) 'the debate about the past tense is not a case in which "two great systems of Western thought (rationalism and empiricism) may be tested and compared on a single rich set of data"'.