Chomsky 1995: 6-7 states as in (i).

(i) This way of formulating the issues, within the P&P model, brings out clearly a crucial inadequacy in the characterization of language as a state of the language faculty. The latter [which seems to refer to 'a state of the language faculty', HH] can hardly be expected to be an instantiation of the initial state with parameter values fixed. Rather, a state of the language faculty is some accidental product of varied experience, of no particular interest in itself, no more so than other collections of phenomena in the natural world (which is why scientists do experiments instead of recording what happens in natural circumstances). My personal feeling is that much more substantial idealization is required if we hope to understand the properties of the language faculty, but misunderstandings and confusion engendered even by limited idealization are so pervasive that it may not be useful to pursue the matter today. Idealization, it should be noted, is a misleading term for the only reasonable way to approach a grasp of reality. (The emphasis is as in the original.)