[ggekko]

"That puts him, I think, in the ID camp, if not the creationist camp..."

Having read some of Chomsky's work I think he would repudiate any such identification. I think Chomsky would shoehorn his theory under a neo-evolutionary framework if he was asked to take a position on the subject (not that that makes any particular sense but he is idelogically hostile to teleology).

The question I was seeking to address was the one alluded to obliquely in the original post. Based on my cursory inspection of Chomsky's work his theory is not a valid scientific theory because it is not defined in such a way that it can ever be proven false. It reminds me a great deal of Freadianism where every psychological behavior is subsumed under the explanation of "supressed drives". Chomsky's "meta grammar" construct seems to me to be equivalent to Freud's "supressed drives"; it is so general of a explanation it is vacuous.

[js1138]

Based on my cursory inspection of Chomsky's work his theory is not a valid scientific theory because it is not defined in such a way that it can ever be proven false.

I'm a bit over my head int the computer science end of this discussion, but I think Chomsky proved that any language comprised of tokens and syntax is equivalent to any other such language.

But applying this to human language requires omitting much of what language is about.

What Skinner tried to do (and apparently failed) is describe how meaning is tokenized. Rather than start with syntax, he tried to describe the function of language, or why it is we talk.