JM: Could we talk a bit more about the notion of simplicity and its development in your work? There's always been that notion of theoretical simplicity; it's continued throughout all of your work. It's simply taken to be characteristic of the nature of scientific investigation. Then there's also that internal simplicity which you pursued in LSLT [The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory] and Aspects [of the Theory of Syntax] . . .[C]

NC: . . . and also in the earlier work. That second one leads directly to what's called “the Minimalist Program.” That's just another name for it. At some point – sort of like in the fifties when you begin to try to reframe the methodological studies of language into a biological perspective – sometimes you can reframe the methodological conditions into empirical hypotheses about how organic systems, or maybe all systems, are formed. And to the extent that you can do that, you can investigate them as empirical hypotheses and look for evidence elsewhere – say, in the formation of snowflakes, or insect navigation, and so on – and see if there really are principles of computational complexity or whatever that are simply a part of nature, just as other natural laws are. And if you can reduce aspects of language to those, you have an account that – in the technical terminology of linguistics, where explanatory adequacy is solving Plato's problem – goes beyond explanatory adequacy.[C] You can begin to ask why the principles of Universal Grammar have these forms and not other forms. It becomes an empirical problem of biology; and it's on a par with others – actually, the kind that Turing was interested in.