[foldr]

> So what's his progress? Everything that I see turns inward, valuable only within the framework that he himself constructed.

It's really not true that the whole of generative linguistics is just some kind of self-referential parlor game. A lot of what we take for granted today as legitimate avenues of research in cognitive science were opened up as a direct consequence of Chomsky's critique of behaviorism and his insight that the mind is best understood as a computational system. Ironically, any respectable LLM will be perfectly happy to cover this in more detail if you probe it with some key terms like "behaviorism", "cognitive revolution" or "computational theory of mind".

> Pirahã

It's very unlikely that Everett's key claims about Pirahã are true (see e.g. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/94631/Nevins-...). But anyway, the universality of recursive clausal embedding has never been a central issue in generative linguistics. Chomsky co-authored one speculative paper late in his career suggesting that recursion in some (vague) sense might be the core computational innovation responsible for the human language faculty. Everett latched on to that claim and the dispute went public, which has given a false impression of its overall centrality to the field.

> So what's his progress?

I don't see how we can discuss this question without getting into specifics, so let me try to push things in that direction. Here is a famous syntax paper by Chomsky: https://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/On_WH-Movement.pdf It claims to achieve various things. Do you disagree, and if so, why?

> Japanese

A generative linguist studying Japanese wouldn't claim to be an expert on the structure of Japanese in your broad sense of the term. One thing to bear in mind is that generative linguistics is entirely opportunistic in its approach to individual languages. Generative linguists don't don't study Japanese because they give a fuck about Japanese as such (any more than physicists study balls rolling down inclined planes because balls and inclined planes are intrinsically fascinating). The aim is just to find data to distinguish competing hypotheses about the human language faculty, not to come to some kind of total understanding of Japanese (or whatever language).

> I guess most experts in LLMs are busy becoming billionaires right now; but if anything resembling Chomsky's universal grammar ever does get found to exist, then I'd guess it will be extracted computationally from models trained on corpora of different languages and not any human insight, in the same way that the Big Five personality traits fall out of a PCA.

This is a common pattern of argumentation. First, Chomsky's work is critically examined according to the highest possible scientific standards (every hypothesis must be strictly falsifiable, etc. etc.) Then when we finally get to see the concrete alternative proposal, it turns out to be nothing more than a promissory note.

[tripletao]

> It's very unlikely that Everett's key claims about Pirahã are true

Everett achieved something unequivocally difficult--after twenty years of failed attempts by other missionaries, he was the first Westerner to learn Pirahã, living among the people and conversing with them in their language. In my view, that gives him significantly greater credibility than academics with no practical exposure to the language (and I assume you're aware of his response to the paper you linked).

I understand that to Chomsky's followers, Everett's achievement is meaningless, in the same way that LLMs saturating almost every prior benchmark in NLP is meaningless. But what achievements outside the "self-referential parlor game" are meaningful then? You must need something to ground yourself in outside reality, right?

> Then when we finally get to see the concrete alternative proposal, it turns out to be nothing more than a promissory note.

I'm certainly not claiming that statistical modeling has already achieved any significant insight into how physical structures in the brain map to an ability to generate language, and I don't think anyone else is either. We're just speculating that it might in future.

That seems a lot less grandiose to me than anything Chomsky has promised. In the present, that statistical modeling has delivered some pretty significant, strictly falsifiable, different but related achievements. Again, what does Chomsky's side have?

> I don't see how we can discuss this question without getting into specifics, so let me try to push things in that direction. Here is a famous syntax paper by Chomsky: https://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/On_WH-Movement.pdf

And when I asked that before, you linked a sixty-page paper, with no further indication ("various things"?) of what you want to talk about. If you're trying to argue that Chomsky's theories are anything but a tarpit for a certain kind of intellectual curiosity, then I don't think that's helping.

[foldr]

Believe Everett if you want to, but it doesn’t make much difference to anything. Not every language has to exploit the option of recursive clausal embedding. The implications for generative linguistics are pretty minor. Yes, Everett responded to the paper I linked, and then there were further papers in the chain of responses (e.g. http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/Nevins_Pesetsky_Rodri...).

> And when I asked that before, you linked a sixty-page paper, with no further indication ("various things"?) of what you want to talk about.

I was suggesting that we talk about the central claim of the paper (i.e. that the answer to question (50) is ‘yes’).

I don’t see how it’s reasonable to ask for something smaller than a paper if you want evidence that Chomsky’s research program has achieved some insight. That’s the space required to argue for a particular viewpoint rather than just state it.

In other words, if I concisely summarize Chomsky’s findings you’ll just dismiss them as bogus, and if I link to a paper arguing for a particular result, you’ll say it’s too long to read. 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.

[tripletao]

> 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?

[foldr]

>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.

[tripletao]

> Sure, Chomsky's work doesn't have practical applications. Most scientific work doesn't.

> Has geology accomplished something considered difficult outside of geology?

Ask an oilfield services company? A structural engineer who needs a foundation? If that work were easy, then their geologists wouldn't get paid.

I could have just said "economically important", but that seemed too limiting to me. For example, computer-aided proofs were a controversial subfield of math, but I'd take their success on the four-color theorem (which came from outside their subfield and had resisted proof by other means) as evidence of their value, despite the lack of practical application for the result. I think that broader kind of success could justify further investment, but I also don't see that here.

> As a former syntactician who's constructed lots of theories that turned out to be false

I should clarify that I do see a concept of falsifiability at that level, of whether a grammar fits a set of examples of a language. That seems pretty close to math or CS to me. I don't see how that small number of examples is supposed to scale to an entire natural language or to anything about the human brain's capability for language, and I don't see any falsifiable attempt to make that connection. (I don't see much progress towards the loftiest goals from the statistical approach either, but their spectacular engineering results break that tie for me.)

Anyways, Merry Christmas if you're celebrating. I guess we're unlikely to be the ones to settle this dispute, but I appreciate the insight into the worldview.

[foldr]

Merry Christmas!

I am not arguing that people should be paid public money to do Chomskyan linguistics. That is an entirely separate question from the question of whether or not Chomsky's key claims are true and whether his research program has made progress. Again, you will have to throw out the majority of science if you hold to the criterion that only work with practical applications has any value.

I also think that you continue to underestimate Chomsky's overall influence on cognitive science. If you think that post-cognitive-revolution cognitive science has achieved anything of note, then you ought to give Chomsky partial credit for that.

>I don't see how that small number of examples is supposed to scale to an entire natural language

Wide coverage generative grammars certainly exist, though they were never something that Chomsky himself was interested in. Here is one in a Chomskyan idiom: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1238.pdf

I'm still puzzled by your point about falsifiability. I haven't seen anything close to a falsifiable claim from people who are excited about the cognitive implications of LLMs. The argument is little more than "look at the cool stuff these things can do – surely brains must work a bit like this too!" Read almost anything by Chomsky and you'll find it's full of quite specific claims that can be empirically tested. I guess people get excited about the fact that the architecture of LLMs is superficially brain-like, but it's doubtful that this gets us any closer to an understanding of the relevant computations at the neural level.