ABSTRACT
Chomsky’s thesis of Universal Grammar is that underlying all human languages is a genetically determined, mostly unconscious system. The poverty of the stimulus – the fact that children learn languages so quickly, on the basis of scanty data – is the most famous consideration for the thesis. A great task is to describe this universal template and to map particular languages onto it. Many technical details and changes are sketched, but philosophically the most notable are: the priority of an internalist conception of meaning over externalist ones; the demotion of the concept of reference; the celebration of rationalism over empiricism; the defiance of Quine-like arguments for indeterminacy; the denial that ‘the purpose’ of language is communication; and the necessity of a fundamental distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance.
