Norbert Hornstein

In this compelling volume, ten distinguished thinkers -- William G. Lycan, Galen Strawson, Jeffrey Poland, Georges Rey, Frances Egan, Paul Horwich, Peter Ludlow, Paul Pietroski, Alison Gopnik, and Ruth Millikan -- address a variety of conceptual issues raised in Noam Chomsky's work. Distinguished list of critics: William G. Lycan, Galen Strawson, Jeffrey Poland, Georges Rey, Frances Egan, Paul Horwich, Peter Ludlow, Paul Pietroski, Alison Gopnik, and Ruth Millikan. Includes Chomsky's substantial new replies and responses to each essay. The best critical introduction to Chomsky's thought as a whole.

Recent interpretations of Locke's primary/secondary quality distinction have tended to emphasize Locke's relationship to the corpuscularian science of his time, especially to that of Boyle. Although this trend may have corrected the unfortunate tendency to view Locke in isolation from his scientific contemporaries, it nevertheless has resulted in some over- simplifications and distortions of Locke's general enterprise. As everyone now agrees, Locke was attempting to provide a philosophical foundation for English corpuscularianism and one must therefore look not only at the current scientific hypotheses but also at the nature of the philosophical foundation Locke was attempting to erect. In particular, Locke made an attempt, based on epistemological principles, to give a philosophical justification of atomistic corpuscularianism. Moreover, he was not content to give this justification post hoc—the epistemological foundation was prior to, and determined the framework for, the details of the correct scientific theory. Locke's epistemology made legitimate an atomistic theory, one making crucial use of the notion of solidity in the definition of the elementary particles, although it did not prejudge the details of this theory.

This paper discusses the main minimalist theory within the Minimalist Program, something I dub the (Weak) Merge Hypothesis (MH). (1) The (Weak) Merge Hypothesis (MH): Merge is a central G operation. I suggest that we extend (1) by adding to it a general principle that I dub the Fundamental Principle of Grammar (FPG). (2) The Fundamental Principle of Grammar (FPG): α and β can be grammatically related. (G-related) only if α and β have merged. Adding (1) and (2) gives us the Strong Merge Hypothesis. (3) The Strong Merge Hypothesis (SMH): All grammatical dependencies are mediated by Merge. SMH has some interesting consequences which the rest of the paper briefly reviews. Highlights include the Movement Theory of Construal, The Periscope Property on selection, as well as preserving the standard results from the Weak Merge Hypothesis.

This article presents a Whig history of Minimalism, suggesting that it is the natural next step in the generative program initiated in the mid 1950s. The program so conceived has two prongs: (i) unifying the disparate modules by demonstrating that they are generated by the same basic operations and respect the same general conditions and (ii) assessing which of these basic operations and conditions are parochial to the faculty of language (FL) and which are reflect more general features of cognitive computation. What makes Minimalism ‘minimal’ is the conviction that the bulk of the operations and principles in FL are proprietary to that cognitive module. The article illustrates the aims of the project by discussing some ways of reducing Binding Theory to the theory of Movement

This paper is divided into three sections. In the first section we offer a retooling of some traditional concepts, namely icons and symbols, which allows us to describe an evolutionary continuum of communication systems. The second section consists of an argument from theoretical biology. In it we explore the advantages and disadvantages of phenotypic plasticity. We argue that a range of the conditions that selectively favor phenotypic plasticity also favor a nongenetic transmission system that would allow for the inheritance of acquired characters. The first two sections are independent, the third depends on both of them. In it we offer an argument that human natural languages have just the features required of an ideal transmission mechanism under the conditions described in section 2.