 Gold’s result, like Putnam’s earlier one, does show that a certain kind of trial-and-error inductive learning is insufficient to permit learning of arbitrary environmental regularities. There has to be some kind of initial bias in the learning procedure or in the data. But ‘empiricism’, the supposed opponent of ‘rationalism’, is not to be equated with a denial of the existence of learning biases. No one doubts that humans have inductive biases. To quote Quine again, “Innate biases and dispositions are the cornerstone of behaviorism, and have been studied by behaviorists” (1972: 95–96). As Lappin and Shieber (2007) stress, there cannot be such a thing as a learning procedure (or processing mechanism) with no biases at all.