Frege and Russell made language central to philosophy in the twentieth century and Ludwig Wittgenstein made ordinary language the core of our interest, how it shapes our thoughts and deeds, how it structures our picture of the world. In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky came on the scene with a radical new take on language though, a new take that partook of old ideas. Picking up from the 17th and 18th century thinkers, particularly the rationalist tradition but also the early empiricists, Chomsky argued that language was so complex that it could not possibly be merely learned by us as children. Rather, he posited, there must be a deep, inherent set of rules encoded in our brains which enable language to grow in us the same way the human embryo grows arms and legs, the infant matures, the child passes through puberty, etc. Language, that is, on his view had to be inherent in creatures like us or it could not occur at all.

The old empiricist tradition which had challenged rationalists like Descartes and rationalist reformers like Kant and others writing in his wake, must have gotten it wrong, Chomsky argued. Kant and his supporters had it right: There must be a structure to experience which arises in the brain itself and which is built in, not learned by trial and error of the organism. The old empiricist idea of the tabula rasa had to be mistaken. . . .