The Thoughts Of Heraclitus And Plato In Formal Linguistics

Russell (1961: 163-4);

Socrates adds to the doctrine of Protagoras the doctrine of Heraclitus, that everything is always changing, i.e. that 'all the things we are pleased to say "are" really are in a process of becoming'.  Plato believes this to be true of objects of sense, but not of objects of real knowledge.

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 Rewording the above to connect with Formal Linguistics:

Chomsky believes this to be true of Performance — that it is really in a state of becoming — but not of Competence (real knowledge of language).

This is why Chomsky is dismissive of both historical linguistics and evolutionary biology, and also why he proposes a statistically implausible macro-mutation in a single individual as the origin of Universal Grammar.  As Linnæus, Leibnitz and Darwin put it:

Natura non facit saltus ("nature does not make jumps").