In a review of George W. Grace's 'The Linguistic Construction of Reality' (London: Croom Helm Publishers, 1987) and a collection of psycholinguistic analyses, 'Lexical Representation and Process' (Marslen-Wilson, William (Ed), Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), the ongoing dichotomy between empiricist and rationalist views of language is illustrated by Grace's characterization of the debate as hinging on rationalists' intertranslatability hypothesis. Grace's reformulation of Whorfian views and the Cartesian perspective implicit in some of the analyses under review are taken as evidence of the longevity of the controversy. The use of metaphor in the development of psychological theory is discussed in this perspective with focus on the terms "model" and "paradigm." (Copyright 1992, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (J. Hitchcock in LLBA 1992, vol. 26, n. 4)