To this Chomsky might reply that engineering successes are not proof of scientific validity. On the other hand, if your buildings collapse and your engines don’t run, perhaps something is wrong with your theory of physics. Chomsky thinks linguists should focus on “ideal” speaker-listeners, as defined by him, and this gives him license to ignore things like the need for statistics in language learning. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that few experimentalists take his theories seriously any more.
