Noam Chomsky's objections to the Kripke/Putnam externalist or causal theory of reference have been developed in various books and articles over the past two decades (see for instance Chomsky 1986, 1988, 1992, 1993, 2000; also Kripke 1980; Putnam 1975a,b,c; Schwartz [ed.] 1977). They involve — as might be expected — a vigorous re-statement of his own internalist view that linguistic competence can be explained only on the basis of innate mental structures which are 'stimulus-free", that is, unconstrained by any causal relation to those various proximal objects or events which at most play a prompting or "triggering" role in the process of language-acquisition. This goes along with his well-known case — deployed over the years against behaviourists of various stripe, from Skinner to Quine — that externalist approaches simply cannot work since they ignore the extent to which our shared (genetically programmed) capacity in this regard outstrips any possible explanation in terms of a naively empiricist psychology or a straightforward stimulus—response model (see Chomsky 1959, 1968; Quine 1961, 1969; Skinner 1957).