We enjoyed reading Matthew Rispoli's review of Rethinking innateness (henceforth RI-Elman et al. 1996). First, we respond to what we see as the major issues that he raises. Finally, we respond to the commentaries contributed by other authors in this issue.

Rispoli has two major concerns. First, he fears that RI will do the field a great disservice, increasing polarization and sowing discontent. To some extent this is an ‘eye of the beholder’ criticism that is difficult to counter: if Rispoli feels more polarized upon reading this book, who are we to argue?

On the whole, I quite like both the target book (RI) and the review by Matthew Rispoli, but there are some additional observations that might be of interest to the readers of this journal. The whole concept of ‘truth through disputation’ is alien to my scientific tradition and I agree with Rispoli that RI is not helped by the polemical tone.

There is a companion volume and software suite by Kim Plunkett & Jeff Elman (1997), Exercises in rethinking innateness, which we have used in an undergraduate cognitive science course. This is, in my opinion, the best source for understanding the main point of RI, which I summarized for the class as: the book tries to show that PDP learning techniques have advanced to the point where we need not assume that tabula rasa learning of language must be ruled out. The Exercises in RI book and particularly doing the on-line examples give the students direct intuition about this claim. Our students were impressed by the Tlearn system, but understood its limitations and were not convinced either of the main claim of RI or of the radical nativist alternative.