Abstract
1. GOALS Since the early sixties, the received view among generative grammarians has been that linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology. On this view, grammars constructed by linguists are hypotheses about psychologically real rules which are responsible for speakers' linguistic abilities and which are causally involved in the production of (some significant portion of) their linguistic behavior. Universal grammar (linguistic theory) is taken to be a theory of the role of innate linguistic knowledge in first language acquisition. I will argue for a different conception in which theories in linguistics are not psychological in this way. It is important to emphasize, however, that my critique of the received view is not an attack on mentalistic accounts of linguistic behavior, nor on cognitive psychology in general. Thus, one must distinguish the following claims:
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