> 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.
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.
> 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.