Basquing in Minimalism

gathered linguists, philosophers, psychologists and computationalists for the first biolinguistics get-together to discuss what the linguistics of the period told us about the structure of the mind/brain. The participants defended two contrasting viewpoints. One group, centered on Piaget’s work, claimed that language mastery supervened on very general laws of cognitive development, language acquisition and use reflecting mental powers continuous with those witnessed in other areas of cognition. A second cohort, with Chomsky’s work as cynosure, countered that the specificity of linguistic competence argued against any general psychological processes that encompassed both linguistic knowledge and other forms of cognition. It is fair to say that Chomsky’s side got the better of the argu-ment. The main problem for the Piagetians was explaining in non-metaphoric detail how their proposed general cognitive and developmental mechanisms could result in the particular kinds of phenomena linguists had discovered (e.g., how does the structure dependence of grammatical operations follow from Piaget’s constructivism?). Chomsky’s challenge was simple: Deduce the “laws