  These issues bear on the argument from the poverty of the stimulus  because that argument may appear more or less impressive depending on the answers one gives to them. If, for instance, one held that  grammars are belief-like entities, explicitly represented in our  heads in some internal code (cf. Stich 1978), then the question of  how those beliefs are acquired and justified is indeed a pressing one — as, for different reasons, is the question of how they  function in performance (see Harman 1967, 1969). However, if one  were to deny that grammar is represented at all in the heads of  speakers, like Devitt 2006 and Soames 1984, then the issue of how  language is learned and what role ‘evidence’ etc. might  play in that process takes on a very different cast. Or if, to take a third possibility, one were to reject generative syntax altogether  and adopt a different conception of what the content of speakers'  grammatical knowledge is — along the lines of Tomasello  (2003), say — then that again affects how one views the learning  process. In other words, one's ideas about what is learned  affect one's conception of what is needed to learn it. Less  ‘demanding’ conceptions of the outputs of language  acquisition require less demanding conceptions of its input (whether  experiential or inborn); this last approach to the problem of  language learning is discussed further in §2.2.1 below.