 The actual relation of Gold’s results to the empiricism/rationalism controversy seems to us rather different. Gold’s paradigm looks a lot more like a formalization of so-called ‘rationalism’. The fixed class of candidate hypotheses (grammars) corresponds to what is given by universal grammar—the innate definition of the essential properties of language. What Gold actually shows, therefore, is not “the plausibility of rationalism” but rather the inadequacy of a huge range of rationalist theories: under a wide range of different choices of universal grammar, language acquisition appears to remain impossible.