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From: zohrab_p@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (Peter Zohrab)
Subject: Re: Chomksy, Significance, and Current Trends
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Date: Sat, 19 Aug 1995 06:49:44 GMT
References: <DD18rC.AK0@actrix.gen.nz> <40q490$bbg@mailnews.kub.nl> <1995Aug15.100147.1@ctdvx5.priv.ornl.gov> <40qkp2$1pm@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>
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In article <40qkp2$1pm@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>,
David Pesetsky  <pesetsk@mit.edu> wrote:
> s25@ctdvx5.priv.ornl.gov wrote:
> >In article <40q490$bbg@mailnews.kub.nl>, dleblanc@kub.nl (David Leblanc) 
> writes:
> > 
> 
> I don't think the analogy holds up.
> 
> Michelson and Morley's work didn't dispose of the ether theory of light 
> transmission by asserting that the proponents of ether just did it because 
> they liked prestige and office politics.

I never said that with repect to Generativists.
> 
> They also didn't show that what was wrong with the ether theory was its 
> lack of attention to what people really *use* light for.

That is partly because language is a product of human behaviour, and light is
not (on the whole).> 

> They also didn't criticise established physics for using experimentation 
> instead of a corpus of naturally occuring events.

I've never said anything remotely similar to this about Generative Grammar.> 

> No, they took an empirical claim, put it to an experimental test, and got a 
> negative result. That's more or less what Chomsky did to Skinner's proposal 
> as well (though his review involved only Gedanken experiments).
> 
I'd like to leave Skinner out of this, and return to the point originally at
issue.  You are making a category error.  I did not criticise the way
Generative Grammar accounted for some phenomenon, for which I might be
expected to provide an alternative explanation. What I said was that there was
a misfit between what the Generative Grammar says about the
Competence-Performance Distinction(s) and what it actually does with it/them
in practice.

I don't want to draw parallels with features of other disciplines, because
then we just get decoyed into irrelevant discussions of the details of the
History of Science.

My point was clear: address it (please) !
 
> 
> -David Pesetsky> 

Peter Zohrab

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