@HexHammer,
@ the OP
I'm not sure how helpful my input will be regarding the falsifiability of Chomsky's generative grammar, but the distinction between objective and subjective has always seemed ambiguous to me, as have the two concepts themselves. To what degree are our sense impressions subjective? Do we merely mean that our ability to register the world around us is limited by our particular location (our position/perspective both spatially and temporally) and the accuracy of our biological instruments (the acuity of our eyes, for example)? Or do we mean that our interpretations of that sense data are inescapably determined by those limitations? Clearly, when we assemble our sense impressions into interpretable patterns we may test new data by seeing how it "fits" with established, tested "facts."
To bring some of Popper into my contribution to this thread, if scientific theory may not be proven, but only falsified then a certain ambiguity lies latent in the concept of objectivity as well. Certain "subjective" data will be
subject to experiment, thus perhaps shifting it's scientific status. Other aspects of interpretation will remain unfalsifiable, but if we insist on seeking a unified worldview we may simply employ the law of noncontradiction to reconcile our unverifiable "interpretations" with experimental results. When experience cannot be realistically absorbed into the larger established pattern, the intellectually honest person will be forced to identify it as a limit case to both scientific/objective
and "subjective" interpretation. Perhaps just such limit cases are the spur for the radical paradigm shifts postulated by Kuhn (against Popper.) Of course, I don't think that everyone requires a unified worldview to operate, and certain personal contradictions often remain unaddressed. (In the Popper v. Kuhn debate, I support Feyerabend.:Cara_2:)
Doesn't that seem to be what happens generally? Of course, what one person will consider an experiment versus another might lead to some controversy. However, my point was that the division between subjective and objective is hardly impermeable.
Off the cuff, do you think that this would be considered an experiment to falsify universal grammar? It's a very random thought, ill-formed, and probably completely wrong-headed, but I'll throw it out anyway:
Take several different control groups of children, each group speaking a separate language at roughly the same skill level, and ask them to write sentences using a small group of vocabulary words, each of which has a semantically similar word in the other languages used in the experiment. Statistically compare the children within each language group to see if there is a common group of grammatical errors to which they are prone, and if there are any that they avoid. Then take a group of children who are raised multilingual and have them write sentences with the same vocabulary words in each of the languages in which they are "fluent". Statistically compare the children within the multilingual group to see if A) there is a pattern of language usage within this group in each of the languages separately, B) whether they commonly commit and avoid the same mistakes as the monolingual children in the sentences in which they share a language, and C) whether the grammar usage of the multilinguists can be "translated" between the languages.
There are a lot of things being assumed above, and, of course, C) is the kicker. No language's grammar is identical with another, so, some usage, and some errors, simply won't transfer from one language to another. However, by studying the data, perhaps some rough equivalencies might be detected. I don't know if any of that was helpful or even reasonable at this point. That generally means that it is bedtime.
