ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the most important challenges to Chomsky's work, and Chomsky's responses to these challenges. One of the most consistent, and most fundamental, challenges to Chomsky has come from the philosopher W. V. Quine. A less radical criticism accepts that generative grammar is possible, but rejects the way that Chomsky spells out the nature of the enterprise. The question is what kind of theories one can build on that basis, and how confident we can be that such theories correspond to reality. Wittgenstein thus questions the whole basis for saying of a person that he tacitly follows a rule. What both Quine and Wittgenstein are attacking is the assumption that there is some realm of being to which a psychological theory has to relate beyond the behaviour it tries to explain. Advocates of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) say that one grammar is more powerful than another if it will generate more languages.
