> So, essentially, you have decided not to engage with Chomsky’s work. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but it does mean that you cannot make informed criticisms of it.
Any criticism that I'd make of homeopathy would be uninformed by the standards of a homeopath--I don't know which poison to use, or how many times to strike the bottle while I'm diluting it, or whatever else they think is important. But to their credit they're often willing to put their ideas to the external test (like with an RCT), and I know that evidence in aggregate shows no benefit. I'm therefore comfortable criticizing homeopathy despite my unfamiliarity with its internals.
I don't claim any qualifications to criticize the internals of Chomsky's linguistics, but I do feel qualified to observe the whole thing appears to be externally useless. It seems to reject the idea of falsifiable predictions entirely, and if one does get made and then falsified then "the implications for generative linguistics are pretty minor". After dominating academic linguistics for fifty years, it has never accomplished anything considered difficult outside the newly-created field. So why is this a place where society should expend more of its finite resources?
Hardy wrote his "Mathematician's Apology" to answer the corresponding question for his more ancient field, explicitly acknowledging the uselessness of many subfields but still defending them. He did that with a certain unease though, and his promises of uselessness also turned out to be mistaken--he repeatedly took number theory as his example, not knowing that in thirty years it would underly modern cryptography. Chomsky's linguists seem to me like the opposite of that, shouting down anyone who questions them (he called Everett a "charlatan") while proudly delivering nothing to the society funding their work. So why would I want to join them?
>but I do feel qualified to observe the whole thing [Chomskyian linguistics] appears to be externally useless
Sure, Chomsky's work doesn't have practical applications. Most scientific work doesn't. It's just that, for obvious reasons, you tend to hear more about the work that does. You mention number theory. Number theory had existed for a lot longer than Chomskyan linguistics has now when Hardy chose it as an example of a field with no practical applications.
> seems to reject the idea of falsifiable predictions entirely,
As a former syntactician who's constructed lots of theories that turned out to be false, I can't really relate to this one. If you look through the generative linguistics literature you can find innumerable instances of promising ideas rejected on empirical grounds. Chomsky himself has revised or rejected his earlier work many times. A concrete example would be the theory of parasitic gaps presented in Concepts and Consequences (quickly falsified by the observation that parasitic gap dependencies are subject to island constraints).
The irony here is that generative syntax is actually a field with a brutal peer review culture and extremely high standards of publication. Actual syntax papers are full of detailed empirical argumentation. Here is one relatively short and accessible example chosen at random: http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTL03/04.pdf
>After dominating academic linguistics for fifty years, it has never accomplished anything considered difficult outside the newly-created field
What does this even mean? Has geology accomplished something considered difficult outside of geology? I don't really understand what standard you are trying to apply here.
Any criticism that I'd make of homeopathy would be uninformed by the standards of a homeopath--I don't know which poison to use, or how many times to strike the bottle while I'm diluting it, or whatever else they think is important. But to their credit they're often willing to put their ideas to the external test (like with an RCT), and I know that evidence in aggregate shows no benefit. I'm therefore comfortable criticizing homeopathy despite my unfamiliarity with its internals.
I don't claim any qualifications to criticize the internals of Chomsky's linguistics, but I do feel qualified to observe the whole thing appears to be externally useless. It seems to reject the idea of falsifiable predictions entirely, and if one does get made and then falsified then "the implications for generative linguistics are pretty minor". After dominating academic linguistics for fifty years, it has never accomplished anything considered difficult outside the newly-created field. So why is this a place where society should expend more of its finite resources?
Hardy wrote his "Mathematician's Apology" to answer the corresponding question for his more ancient field, explicitly acknowledging the uselessness of many subfields but still defending them. He did that with a certain unease though, and his promises of uselessness also turned out to be mistaken--he repeatedly took number theory as his example, not knowing that in thirty years it would underly modern cryptography. Chomsky's linguists seem to me like the opposite of that, shouting down anyone who questions them (he called Everett a "charlatan") while proudly delivering nothing to the society funding their work. So why would I want to join them?