I should also mention work on history and philosophy of science, which has begun to furnish a richer and more exact understanding of the manner in which ideas develop and take root in the natural sciences. This work -- for example, that of Thomas Kuhn or Imer Lakatos -- has gone well beyond the often artificial models of verification and falsification, which were prevalent for a long time and which exercised a dubious influence on the "soft sciences," as the latter did not rest on the foundations of a healthy intellectual tradition that could guide their development. It is useful, in my opinion, for people working in these fields to become familiar with ways in which the natural sciences have been able to progress; in particular, to recognize how, at critical moments of their development, they have been guided by radical idealization, a concern for depth of insight and explanatory power rather than by a concern to accommodate "all the facts" -- a notion that approaches meaninglessness -- even at times disregarding apparent counterexamples in the hope (which at times has proven justified only after many years or even centuries) that subsequent insights would explain them. These are useful lessons that have been obscured in much of the discussion about epistemology and the philosophy of science.

In order to evaluate the above passage, we need to understand what is meant by (1).

(1)　a.　the often artificial models of verification and falsification
　　b.　the "soft sciences"

My guess is that what is meant by (1a) is the models by philosophers in which verification and falsification of a scientific hypothesis is to be done on the basis of some concrete observational facts, or something like that (this is the thesis of "logical positivism," I understand). I assume that what is meant by (1b) are inquires beyond the 'natural sciences' (such as social sciences, perhaps including linguistics, as it is practiced in much of the field -- with generative research not being exempted here, I would hate to say).

It might not be an overstatement to say that how one understands (2) below in the context of generative grammar, and more in particular in the context of assessing one's own research, may 'define' one's orientation as a researcher.

(2)　　[A]t critical moments of their development, [the natural sciences] have been guided by radical idealization, a concern for depth of insight and explanatory power rather than by a concern to accommodate "all the facts"― a notion that approaches meaninglessness ― even at times disregarding apparent counterexamples in the hope (which at times has proven justified only after many years or even centuries) that subsequent insights would explain them.

One might, for example, take (2) to mean that we should not be too concerned with, or impressed by, empirical observations since, after all, empirical observations alone never determine the fate of a scientific theory, anyway.

Let us try to compare the approach taken by those who try to do generative grammar as an empirical science (with progress in mind) (henceforth the GGES approach, abbreviating Generative Grammar as an Empirical Science) with a non-GGES approach, by raising the following questions for each of the two approaches.

(3)　a.　Are they guided by radical idealization?
　　b.　Are they guided by a concern to accommodate "all the facts"?
　　c.　Are they guided by a concern for depth of insight and explanatory power?
　　d.　Do they at times disregard apparent counterexamples?

We should also ask whether the answers to these questions for each approach would hold only "at critical moments of their development."
　　Re. (3a), it seems that our research is always guided by radical idealization and it is not only "at critical moments of [the] development [of our theory]," and this seems to apply to both approaches although there may be some difference in regard to the 'degrees'―I would think that the GGES approach tends to do more idealization but this point would need further elaboration, on the basis of actual examples, and I must return to this on a separate occasion. Re (3b), neither approach seems to be guided by a concern to accommodate "all the facts." So, neither (3a) nor (3b) seems to distinguish between the two approaches.
　　What about (3d)? Well, both approaches do seem to disregard apparent counterexamples at times. But how they do it might not be the same, and that might be one of the crucial differences between the two approaches. My Lingua paper (Hoji 2003) perhaps can be understood as providing a very rough illustration of the difference, if we consider the discussion in the earlier sections of the paper as an illustration of how apparent counterexamples are treated by GGES researchers. It must be noted that the apparent counterexamples discussed in that paper are not simply disregarded. While it is true that they are put aside without a theoretical characterization of them, a minimal descriptive characterization of those counterexamples (to the generalizations pursued there) is indeed offered, thereby making it possible to control the unwanted factors in conducting the syntactic experiments that are intended to probe into the nature of the speakers' linguistic intuitions that are hypothesized to arise from the language faculty proper.
　　It may be worth considering here what is meant by a counterexample. There are two types of empirical observations that go against what we claim. One type is against the generalization that we put forth, and the other type goes against the predictions of our hypothesis in the context of a wider theory in which the hypothesis is formulated. We may decide to ignore both types of counterexamples. But to ignore the former type would seriously undermine the empirical basis of our hypothesis, and we must be aware of that. If we do not have a way to characterize the former type of counterexamples in some way, we will not be able to conduct experiments to test our hypothesis; see the discussion on otagai in my Lingua paper.
　　For the latter type, I would be more sympathetic to, and I can perhaps agree with, what Chomsky states. But here too it is important to recognize the possibility that the empirical evidence in question (i.e., the results of the experiments that do not confirm the prediction) might ultimately lead us to reject the approach we may be pursuing at a given time. We should at least try to formulate the hypothesis and deduce predictions in such a way that we will in principle be ready to modify or reject our hypothesis if the predictions do not get confirmed. This seems to me to be the basic attitude we should have in constructing and formulating our hypothesis and predictions, and in carefully designing our experiments to test our hypotheses.

　　Notice that the content of the crucial notions in (3c) are quite obscure and can be very subjective. Stating or endorsing something like (4) should therefore give one cause for concern, to say the least.

(4)　　 "[A] concern for depth of insight and explanatory power" should guide our research more than a concern for how our predictions are borne out.

As long as we articulate our hypothesis rigorously enough -- in the context of a well-articulated theory -- we should be able to make definite and testable predictions; cf. severe tests in Mayo 1996 (Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge). By carefully designing an experiment to test the predictions, we should be able to tell, fairly objectively, whether or not the predictions are borne out. We would face a very different situation if we tried to determine how insightful a given hypothesis/theory is or how much explanatory power it might have.
　　If Chomsky (1979: 70-71 ) is claiming, in his remarks on C. Peirce¹, that we must have, and hence can rely on, some intuition about "correct theories," such a position would, in my view, come close to declaring that generative grammar cannot be an empirical science (with progress in mind). I suspect that Chomsky is comparing, in his remarks above, generative grammar on the one hand and structural linguistics and some behaviorist/empiricist-oriented research activities on the other.² Insofar as we understand his remarks that way, one might conclude that comparison between the GGES and non-GGES approaches is somewhat out of context here. I would however like to think that his remarks above and the brief discussion I have provided above might in fact be quite suggestive as to what Chomsky considers (his) generative grammar to be and what GGES aspires to do. Conspicuously missing in Chomsky's remarks above (and remarks here and there in Chomsky 1995: chap. 1, as well) are concerns about how to deduce predictions from our hypothesis, and more importantly, how to test those predictions. I would be inclined to think that "depth of insight and explanatory power" can be meaningfully addressed only when our research activities are accompanied by those concerns and the practices that reflect them. The last point must be elaborated on, and I will try to do that in a separate posting.

FN1: The relevant part is "Peirce argues that to account for the growth of knowledge, one must assume that "man's mind had a natural adaptation to imagining correct theories of some kinds," some principle of "abduction" which "puts a limit on admissible hypothesis," a kind of "instinct," developed in the course of evolution."
FN2: It may be the case that what Chomsky had in mind here was not just the structuralist/behaviorist approach in general but also generative semantics specifically.