ABSTRACT
Many years after the fact, I finally got around to reading Piattelli-Palmerini (1980), the chronicle of the 1975 debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, with the participation of many other interested parties. Being a deeply committed Chomskian, though not an altogether orthodox one, I was surprised by the vehemence of the debate. After all, Piaget and Chomsky have a great deal in common. Both believe in complex unconscious mental processing. Both believe that the structure of the world we experience is in large part determined by internal mental constructs of potentially great abstraction. Both are firmly opposed to behaviorism.
