` The goals of intuitive approaches necessitate their inability to explain why language changes, an important theoretical question known as the "actuation problem.`

Chomsky's idealization of a native speaker in a homogenous speech community produces a paradox, according to Labov: any explanation produced from these reductions would explain why lanfguage would stay the same rather than why it changes, a situation at odds with language as it operates in the world. This is the "actuation problem" which Labov sees as at the base of monolectal, idiolectal approaches--they are fundamentally incapable of explaining performative variation and they cannot explain why languages change, either from a structuralist perspective within the language or from a historical comparativist's perspective without.