  Over the years, two conceptions of the innate contribution to  language learning and its elaboration during the learning process  have been proposed. In earlier writings (e.g., Chomsky 1965), Chomsky saw learning a language as basically a matter of formulating and  testing hypotheses about its grammar — unconsciously, of  course. He argued that in order to acquire the correct grammar, the  child must innately know a “a linguistic theory that specifies  the form of the grammar of a possible human language” (1965:25) — she must know UG in other words. He saw this knowledge as  being embodied in a suite of innate linguistic abilities, concepts,  and constraints on the kinds of grammatical rules learners can  propose for testing. On this view (1965:30-31), the inborn UG  includes (i) a way of analyzing and representing the incoming  linguistic data; (ii) a set of linguistic concepts with which to  state grammatical hypotheses; (iii) a way of telling how the data  bear on those hypotheses (an ‘evaluation metric’); and  (iv) a very restrictive set of constraints on the hypotheses that are available for consideration. (i) through (iv) constitute the  ‘initial state’ of the language faculty, and the child  arrives at the final state (knowledge of her language) by performing  what is basically a kind of scientific inquiry into its nature.