Creativity, Truth, and Their Conditions: Chomsky, Foucault, and the Grid of Discourse

Introduction: Where Does Creativity Come From?

In 1971, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault took part in a public debate at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Moderated by the philosopher Fons Elders, the discussion focused on fundamental philosophical questions: how should creativity and truth be explained? Are they grounded in the capacities of individual subjects, or do they emerge from historically specific systems that precede and shape those subjects?

These questions are not only at the heart of the debate itself, but also central to Foucault’s inaugural lecture, The Order of Discourse. Read together, these texts reveal two opposing strategies for accounting for novelty: Chomsky’s restoration of the speaking subject and Foucault’s displacement of the knowing subject in favor of what may be called a "grid of intelligibility."

Chomsky: Creativity and the Speaking Subject

Chomsky’s intervention in linguistics responds to a specific theoretical problem. Behaviorist models of language treated speech as the result of conditioning and repetition, leaving little room for genuine novelty. Against this view, Chomsky argues that ordinary language use already demonstrates creativity: speakers routinely produce sentences they have never encountered before.

To explain this fact, he posits an internal system of rules—grammar—that enables the generation of infinitely many expressions from finite means. These rules are not socially imposed from the outside but mentally instantiated in each speaker. While language is undoubtedly collective, its productive force is located in the cognitive endowment of individuals.

In this framework, the subject is indispensable. Creativity cannot be explained by external stimuli or historical accumulation alone; it requires a generative capacity rooted in the mind. Structure, for Chomsky, does not eliminate agency, it makes agency possible.

Foucault: Decentering the Knowing Subject

Foucault approaches a very different terrain: the history of knowledge. Here, he argues, the problem is not that the subject has been ignored, but that it has been overemphasized. Traditional historiography tends to organize discoveries around inventors, authors, and founding figures, treating collective forms of thought as mere background or resistance.

This emphasis is paired with a second assumption: truth is imagined as timeless and external to history, merely awaiting disclosure. Historical circumstances are thus cast in a negative role, as prejudices or myths that delay access to what is already there. The knowing subject, in turn, must occupy an “eccentric” position—outside the dominant beliefs of an era—in order to perceive truth.

Foucault rejects this configuration. Rather than viewing history as an obstacle to knowledge, he treats it as the medium through which knowledge becomes possible. What requires explanation is not who first discovered a truth, but how a particular form of intelligibility came into existence at all.

La grille d’intelligibilité

To make this shift, Foucault introduces what can be described as a grid of intelligibility. This grid consists of rules that govern what can appear as an object of knowledge, what counts as a valid statement, and which practices are recognized as meaningful. It does not function as a theory or an ideology, nor is it reducible to institutions or individual intentions.

The often-cited transformation of medicine between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries illustrates this point. Within a few decades, not only diagnoses and treatments changed, but the very way illness was perceived and discussed. No single author can be credited with this shift, because it involved a collective reorganization of perception, language, and practice.

Unlike Kuhn’s paradigm, which structures problem-solving within a scientific field, Foucault’s grid operates at a deeper level. It determines what can count as a problem in the first place.

The Order of Discourse: Prohibition as Structure

The Order of Discourse approaches the same phenomenon from another angle. Here, Foucault emphasizes that discourse is never freely available; it is regulated by procedures that limit who may speak, about what, and in what manner. These limitations are often described as prohibitions, but they should not be understood as external censorship.

Such exclusions are internal to discourse itself. They do not simply silence speech; they render certain utterances unintelligible or illegitimate. The division between reason and madness, or between science and non-science, exemplifies this mechanism.

Seen in this light, prohibition is not the opposite of productivity. It is one of its conditions. The grid that makes statements possible simultaneously defines the boundaries beyond which speech loses its status as knowledge.

Language, Knowledge, and the Question of the Subject

At this point, the contrast with Chomsky becomes sharper. Both thinkers insist on rule-governed productivity, and both reject empiricist accounts that reduce novelty to accumulation. The difference lies in explanatory priority. Chomsky asks how individuals can generate new expressions; Foucault asks under what historical conditions such expressions can function as knowledge.

If language and knowledge each have individual and collective dimensions, does Foucault’s approach risk erasing agency altogether? The concern is understandable. By focusing on anonymous systems, he offers little account of intention or responsibility. Yet his aim is not to deny individual action, but to show that action is intelligible only within a pre-existing field of possibilities.

Conclusion: Creativity Reconsidered

The opposition between Chomsky and Foucault is therefore less a disagreement about creativity than about where creativity should be located. Chomsky situates it in the generative capacities of the subject; Foucault relocates it within historically specific grids that make subjects, objects, and truths possible.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest a more complex picture. Creativity may neither originate solely in the mind nor dissolve entirely into structure, but emerge from their interaction. The enduring value of the debate lies precisely in forcing this question to remain open.

References

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press.

Chomsky, N. (1972). Language and mind (2nd ed.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky–Foucault debate: On human nature (F. Elders, Ed.). The New Press.
(Original debate held 1971)

Foucault, M. (1970). The order of discourse (I. McLeod, Trans.). In R. Young (Ed.), Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (pp. 48–78). Routledge & Kegan Paul.
(Original lecture delivered 1970)

Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
(Original work published 1969)

Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Vintage Books.
(Original work published 1963)

Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
(Original work published 1967)