This most recent exposition of Chomsky's ideas about the language faculty strives to reach a deeper level of explanatory adequacy. Rather than the question of “What does knowledge of language consist of?” Chomsky asks the question “Why is the language faculty the way it is?” His basic answer to this question is the following: Two sorts of conditions are imposed on the language faculty, conditions arising from its place in the cognitive architecture “bare output conditions” and conditions of conceptual naturalness such as economy, simplicity, and nonredundancy. Minimalism is thus a call for theoretical simplicity with respect to the constructs used to explain language phenomena: “It is all too easy to succumb to the temptation to offer purported explanation for some phenomenon on the basis of assumptions that are roughly of the order of complexity of what is to be explained. . . . Minimalist demands at least have the merit of highlighting such moves, thus sharpening the question of whether we have a genuine explanation or a restatement of the problem in other terms” (pp. 234–235).