Basquing in Minimalism

In 1975, in an old abbey in Royaumont, France, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini 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 argument. 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 " of grammar from the more general laws of psychology/development, or concede that the mind/brain contains very specific linguistically dedicated mental structures that guide the emergence of linguistic competence and performance. The Royaumont volume (Piattelli-Palmarini 1980) serves as an interesting backdrop to the one under review here. Once again, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini serves as impresario (this time in concert with Juan Uriagereka and Pello Salaburu) and convenes a group of distinguished linguists, psychologists, biologists , and neuroscientists in a very scenic spot (San Sebastian in Spain's Basque Country) to discuss what current linguistic theory suggests about the structure of the mind/brain. This time round, however, the relevant linguistic perspective is the one offered by the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995 et seq.). Consequently, much of the discussion aims to minimize the degree to which language mastery requires specifically linguistic mental powers and emphasizes the continuation between linguistic competence and other cognitive capacities. It is tempting to conclude from this that, although the Piagetians lost the earlier battle, they decisively won the peace by converting their antagonists.