ABSTRACT
About 25 years ago, Noam Chomsky offered an argument aimed at showing that human beings must have a rich store of innate knowledge, because without such innate knowledge it would be impossible for children to learn a language on the basis of the data available to them. This “argument from the poverty of the stimulus” has had an enormous impact in linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy. Jerry Fodor has described it as “the existence proof for the possibility of cognitive science … [and] quite possibly the only important result to date”. 1 Hornstein and Lightfoot have urged that the argument serves as the foundation for most current work in linguistics. 2 And a number of authors, including Chomsky himself, have maintained that the argument from the poverty of the stimulus shows that empiricist theories of the mind are mistaken and that “the only substantive proposal to deal with the problem of acquisition of knowledge of language is the rationalist conception.…” 3
