In his text Peri Hermeneias (‘On Interpretation’) Aristotle tells us: ‘Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience.’ For him, as for Chomsky, the language system has a material location: the human mind. Without human minds, there would be no language system.

The belief that the human mind is, or contains, a mechanism that makes us speak and understand has been with us ever since Aristotle. Innateness and universality are by no mean novel ideas. The philosophy of the Western world has, with few exceptions, always adhered to the belief that language as such, in its pure and perennial form, is found in the mind, and that all the language decay in its spoken and written reality is due to the objectionable influences of social deterioration.

Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias is worth quoting in more detail, as an early example of the belief that the words we use correspond to innate and universal mental concepts. These are the first sentences of Aristotle's tract: