Books are to insights what belatedly closed barn doors are to horses. By the time they get finished, it is not entirely clear (at least to the author) why you wrote them and why it all took so long. This particular project has some immodest aims. Here are the two central ones.

First, it tries to outline (yet again) a way of understanding the minimalist project. This time around, I try to provide a rarefied empirical motivation. Following the lead of Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) I trot out an evolutionary argument called, unoriginally, “Darwin's Problem.” I couple this with a second neurobiological reason based on Poeppel and Embick (2005) which, following them, I call the Granularity Mismatch Problem. These two problems, I propose, should function as high-level empirical boundary conditions on adequate accounts of the properties of Universal Grammar (UG) and the structure of the Faculty of Language (FL), much as Plato's Problem has in earlier inquiry. Thus, theories of UG and FL will have to address all three problems to be explanatorily adequate. The addition of this pair of requirements on explanatory adequacy is the central contribution of the Minimalist Program.

Second, it outlines a way of operationalizing these concerns by proposing a particular theoretical project: to derive the properties of UG from simpler, more natural empirical primitives. This project is very like the one outlined in Chomsky (1977) with regard to Ross's islands. Both begin from the assumption that earlier accounts are roughly empirically correct.