Minimalist Program - Criticisms

Criticisms

In the late 1990s, David E. Johnson and Shalom Lappin published the first detailed critiques of Chomsky's minimalist program. This technical work was followed by a lively debate with proponents of minimalism on the scientific status of the program. The original article provoked several replies and two further rounds of replies and counter-replies in subsequent issues of the same journal.

Lappin et al. argue that the Minimalist Program is a radical departure from earlier Chomskyan linguistic practice that is not motivated by any new empirical discoveries, but rather by a general appeal to "perfection", which is both empirically unmotivated and so vague as to be unfalsifiable. They compare the adoption of this paradigm by linguistic researchers to other historical paradigm shifts in natural sciences and conclude that the adoption of the Minimalist Program has been an "unscientific revolution", driven primarily by Chomsky's authority in linguistics. The several replies to the article in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory Volume 18 number 4 (2000) make a number of different defenses of the Minimalist Program. Some claim that it is not in fact revolutionary or not in fact widely adopted, while others agree with Levine and Johnson on these points, but defend the vagueness of its formulation as not problematic in light of its status as a research program rather than a theory (see above).

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