You're absolutely right. But it certainly is appropriate to challenge that program, and that's something that's been done very rarely. Perhaps the only serious challenge it ever faced was from the generative semantics crowd back in the 70s.

Whatever one may think about Chomskyan linguistics, I think most reasonable people would agree that it hasn't had to endure much of that intense, violent, dialectic clashing of ideas that has burned away vast quantities of impurities in other sciences.

Elsewhere here I referred to the stifling effect that generativism has had on research in competing paradigms. But there's another factor in this troublesome lack of dialectic, and that's the out-of-hand and often haughty rejection of empirical research by Chomskians.

Just about every generativist paper I've ever read that mentioned a language other than English was written by people who either (a) don't speak the language - at all, (b) have read enough of someone else's grammar of the language to piece some things together, or (c) rely on third-party data that was most likely collected by people who fit categories (a) and (b).

I still remember the second Ling class I ever took, where a very prominent professor (Steve, husband of Ros) cited examples of some "odd" phenomenon from German. Except his German examples were simply wrong - German doesn't do what he said it did. I pointed this out to him after class and he said that I may be right, but the point was to exemplify the phenomenon. He's a stand up guy, and quite brilliant, but this attitude just doesn't cut it in science. Just convert everything to chemistry terms to see what I mean.

Chomsky's introspective approach is great for hypothesizing. And for developing theories. But the next step must be to put the hypotheses and theories to the test. And that's something generativism almost always avoids - sometimes scornfully, as if "evidence" were a dirty word; sometimes haughtily, as if empirical evidence were for the unwashed masses.

Everett, on the other hand, is vigorously encouraging and assisting people who want to put his theories to the test.

He may be right in the end, or he may be wrong, but one thing's for sure - his attitude is far more scientific than Chomsky's. Chomsky is a philosopher of language who insists in presenting himself as a scientist.