Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism1

This article is a reply to the foregoing responses to our “Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments” (Pullum and Scholz, this special volume, hereafter EASPA). We Þrst address certain philosophical themes that cut across all six responses.We correct the impression held by Lasnik andUriagereka (L&U) and Crain and Pietroski (C&P) that EASPA owes the reader an alternative theory of language acquisition; we distinguish linguistic nativism from several alternatives, only one of them being anti-nativism as espoused by Sampson; we examine the claim of Thomas that there is an identiÞable concept ‘poverty of the stimulus’ in the linguistics literature; we point out that Fodor and Crowther (F&C) appear to misunderstand certain mathematical learnability results; and we address a purported argument for nativism (quite distinct from the stimulus poverty argument we considered in EASPA) that is advanced independently by several respondents: F&C, L&U, and Legate and Yang (L&Y) – an argument based on the underdetermination of theory by evidence.