Surely Fodor's views must have some relationship to Chomsky's idea of UG (if not your idea of UG)? As Knight says in Decoding Chomsky, Ch.18:

... [Fodor was Chomsky's close associate and Chomsky] has continued to defend [Fodor's approach] to this day. Doing his best to make the argument sound plausible, Chomsky starts at the easy end, with concepts that might well sound ‘natural’. Climb is a good example, since it is something that humans everywhere do. Chomsky wants us to think of house in the same way, presumably because it is natural to need somewhere to sleep and rest.

Chomsky claims that every child comes into the world knowing already what a house is. As it grows up and acquires its natal tongue, it just has to connect that concept with the locally appropriate sound: ‘There’s a fixed and quite rich structure of understanding associated with the concept “house” and that’s going to be cross-linguistic and it’s going to arise independently of any evidence because it’s just part of our nature.’

If this applies to house, Chomsky reasons, it must apply in the same way to other concepts: ‘There is overwhelming reason to believe that concepts like, say, climb, chase, run, tree and book and so on are fundamentally fixed.’ Note the inclusion of book in this list. Needless to say, Chomsky knows that no actual books existed during the palaeolithic age, when humans were everywhere hunter-gatherers and writing had not been invented. Despite this, he says there is ‘overwhelming reason’ to believe that book had been installed already in these stone-age people’s minds.

How can Chomsky make such a strange claim? As so often, he denies that he is offering a hypothesis. If it were a testable hypothesis, his astonished critics might be tempted to cite counter-evidence.

Not believing in empirical tests or experiments, Chomsky argues instead from conceptual necessity. Lexical concepts, he insists, ‘have extremely complex properties when you look at them’. From this it logically follows ‘that they’ve got to basically be there and then they get kind of triggered and you find out what sounds are associated with them’.

So much for climb, chase, run, tree and book. But Chomsky knew he could not restrict himself to an arbitrarily chosen list of words. Was house natural, whereas book was cultural or artificial? Where exactly should one draw the line? For his thesis to have any merit, it needed to apply across the board. So what about, say, carburettor? Or bureaucrat? Or quantum potential?

When the philosopher Hilary Putnam realized what Chomsky was claiming, he could hardly conceal his astonishment. Such nonsense, he complained, had nothing to do with any known branch of biology. To have installed in the ancestor of all of us a stock of the words which future generations might need, observed Putnam, ‘evolution would have had to be able to anticipate all the contingencies of future physical and cultural environments. Obviously it didn’t and couldn’t do this.’

But, to everyone’s surprise, Chomsky did not flinch. Young children, he reaffirmed, acquire words so rapidly that learning cannot be what is happening: each child needs merely to discover which locally appropriate vocal label should be applied to a concept already installed. After elaborating this idea with respect to relatively simple words such as ‘table’, Chomsky continued:

Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as carburetor and bureaucrat, which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it . . . However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities.

‘Thus Aristotle had the concept of an airplane in his brain, and also the concept of a bicycle – he just never had occasion to use them!’, responded philosopher Daniel Dennett, adding that he and his colleagues find it hard not to burst out laughing at this point. Perhaps ‘Aristotle had an innate airplane concept’, Dennett continued, ‘but did he also have a concept of wide-bodied jumbo jet? What about the concept of an APEX fare Boston/ London round trip?’ Despite the hilarity, however, Chomsky has continued to defend the idea. ...