Reviewed by: Rhyme and reason: An introduction to minimalist syntax by Juan Uriagareka Robert D. Levine Rhyme and reason: An introduction to minimalist syntax. By Juan Uriagareka. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Pp. xlii, 669. In a foreword that can only be described as embarrassingly fawning, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini remarks of Rhyme and reason: An introduction to minimalist syntax (hereafter RR) that ‘this book was indeed badly needed’ (xxv). Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true: This is a book whose appearance is difficult to justify, either as an exploration of its subject matter or as a presentation of that matter for the naive reader. In spite of its subtitle, RR seems far more an exercise in mystification, in which the deliberate choice of a dialogue format makes it possible for Uriagareka to mix vague characterizations of selected aspects of minimalist doctrine, irrelevant and often inappropriate references to results in real branches of hard science, arguments from authority, and empirically groundless speculation, all without having to take responsibility for the content so presented. The idea seems to be that a dialogue, after all, is a conversation between two fictional characters, and how much blame can attach to an author for what his characters say? As becomes clearer below, the dialogue format allows U to implement a style of presentation in which one of the participants—the Other—basically can say anything which pops into his head, with the second participant, the Linguist, sagely questioning and guiding the Other’s thinking and recasting his naive inferences into appropriate minimalist conclusions but with the reader never quite able to find a tight strand of reasoning or pin down a specific claim. Over six days of conversation, divided into chapters portentously titled ‘The first day’, ‘The second day,’ etc., the two supposedly move from the most general level of thinking about human language to the detailed complexities of the minimalist program (MP) as formulated in Chomsky 1995 and revised in subsequent work. What actually happens, however, is something quite different. Piatelli-Palmarini’s foreword sets the stage perfectly for what’s to come, with the resounding announcement that ‘this brand of linguistics is well on its way to becoming a full-blown natural science … whose idealizations, abstractions, and deductions will eventually match in subtlety those of the most advanced domains of modern science’ (xxv), as though the murky and frequently inconsistent network of premises expounded in The minimalist program and its subsequent developments was only a little bit behind the electroweak synthesis achieved by quantum electro-dynamics. This insistence on coupling minimalist-style theorizing with the most impressive, hard-won achievement of physics, chemistry, and biology presages U’s strategy in the main text, particularly Ch. 1.1 Much of U’s practice in RR is anticipated in the caveat he gives in his preface—after the first of what will be a series throughout the book of invocations of the Fibonacci sequence—that ‘the question remains what [these] findings mean for theories concerned with complexity. For the most part that is not my concern, though I can understand and expect that others may want to pursue such questions in the context of evolutionary studies, … and perhaps other domains’ (xxxviii). In fact, neither Fibonacci sequences, nor any of the ‘complexity’-related material that U invokes—which in the following chapters include evolutionary mechanisms, emergent properties, phase transitions in crystallization, self-organizing systems, turbulence and other such stuff—have the slightest connection with the actual content of the MP as a theory of human language. Bearing in mind U’s acknowledgement that such things are ‘not my concern’, [End Page 325] readers may wonder what the point of such relentless invocation of tangential material is. This is especially true in the first chapter, in which the Other somehow materializes into the Linguist’s universe and they start exchanging views, mostly at the level of what is euphemistically called cocktail party chit-chat, whose relation to linguistics is carefully left largely obscure. Rather than address foundational issues clearly and precisely, U’s discussants wander superficially all over the map of current science, bringing in a host of disconnected references to biological evolution with only the vaguest...