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“When I say ousia or on for Being, it's not simply a conventional sign associated with a concept; you cannot dissociate a concept from a language, from what we call a natural language.” — Jacques Derrida , Talking Liberties , interview with  Alan Montefiore 1. The Problem of Familiar Words When we read philosophy, we encounter words such as word , term , meaning , concept , language , and sign , and we usually have little difficulty understanding them in ordinary contexts. We know what a word is, what it means for something to have a meaning , and what it is to call something a concept .  Speakers intuitively recognize the units that matter in discourse, even though they may not be able to explain systematically how those units are distinguished or related.  The difficulty begins when these familiar terms become part of a philosophical argument, where distinctions that seem obvious in ordinary contexts may acquire a more precise or entirely different role. This...

Writing Without Origin. AI generated   Introduction: Fault Lines in a Storied Paradigm Noam Chomsky revolutionized modern linguistics by proposing that human language is rooted in a biologically endowed faculty of mind. In his view, language is primarily an internal system for organizing thought, not a tool for communication. The hypothesis of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), governed by an innate Universal Grammar (UG), positioned human cognition at the center of linguistic creativity and syntactic complexity. Language, Chomsky famously argued, is “a mirror of mind” (Chomsky, 2000, p. 4). Today, however, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini challenge this vision. These systems, devoid of any biological substrate or mental architecture, generate coherent and seemingly intelligent discourse through purely statistical operations. Their success forces us to reassess the foundations of linguistic theory. More provocatively, Chomsky himself has ...