So, again, we see that there are tons of works out there that we could discuss if we wanted to. But the question is whether it would be good use of our time to do that. Since that has reminded me of Weinberg's remark quoted in Tips [39809], I copy the posting here.

***Copied from Tips [39809] "Making a judgment as to what to work on"***

Weinberg, Steven 1992: 49-50.

"At any one moment one is presented with a wide variety of innovative ideas that might be followed up: not only astrology and such, but many ideas much closer to the main stream of science, and others that are squarely within the scope of modern scientific research. It does no good to say that all these ideas must be thoroughly tested; there is simply no time. I receive in the mail every week about fifty preprints of articles on elementary particle physics and astrophysics, along with a few articles and letters on all sorts of would-be science. Even if I dropped everything else in my life, I could not begin to give all of these ideas a fair hearing. So what am I to do? Not only scientists but everyone else faces a similar problem. For all of us, there is simply no alternative to making a judgment as well as we can that some of these ideas (perhaps most of them) are not worth pursuing. And our greatest aid in making this judgment is our understanding of the pattern of scientific explanation."

Weinberg, Steven. 1992. Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature. New York: Pantheon Books.

Because I am not providing the parts that surround the quoted passage, what is given above may be somewhat misleading. In a nutshell, Weinberg is addressing what he calls "would-be sciences" (such as astrology, precognition, creationism, etc.) and answering the question: "what should a thoughtful citizen conclude when it is claimed by a professor or a film star or Time-Life Books that there is evidence for the validity of one of the would-be sciences?" and responding to "the conventional answer ... that this evidence must be tested with an open mind and without theoretical preconceptions."

At any rate, I liked "For all of us, there is simply no alternative to making a judgment as well as we can that some of these ideas (perhaps most of them) are not worth pursuing." Because it makes me feel much better not reading most of the papers published out there. Whether or not that is a good attitude, it indeed seems to be the case that [e]ven if I dropped everything else in my life, I could not begin to give all of [those papers published in linguistics, even restricting to the papers dealing with Japanese or issues that I work on] a fair hearing.
***End of the copied posting***

If "[the physicists'] greatest aid in making this judgment is [their] understanding of the pattern of scientific explanation," what might be our greatest aid in language faculty science at the current stage in making this judgment? I would say that we insist on paying attention to whether we are seeing in a given work (what promises to be) a confirmed schematic asymmetry and, perhaps more importantly, whether a given work seems to aspire to make *Schema-based predictions. (That is the essential aspect of research that pursues rigorous testability.) If we do not see (what promises to be) a confirmed schematic asymmetry or any sign of an attempt to make a *Schema-based prediction, that helps us make "this judgment," I think.