ABSTRACT
The publication of Noam Chomsky’s (2000) essays on language and mind provides a suitable occasion on which to reconsider the critical realist reception of Chomskyan theory. Chomsky’s ‘linguistic nativism’ (Sampson 1999), with its avowedly Cartesian orientation (cf. Chomsky 1966), has always tended to polarise scientific and philosophical opinion. In some quarters the very idea of innate linguistic and other mental faculties is dismissed offhand as idealist and/or unscientific, while in others it is celebrated as an important scientific contribution (not to say revolution).
