Is There a Crisis in Generative Linguistics?

The claim is not just that one finds questionable examples in linguistics papers, but that lax data-collection standards have led to the growth of theories that are based upon bogus data. If these charges stick, then we face a genuine crisis. In order for there to be a crisis, however, it would need to be the case that (i) Intuitive judgments have led to generalizations that are widely accepted yet bogus. (ii) Misleading judgments form the basis of important theoretical claims or debates. (iii) Carefully controlled judgment studies would solve these problems. Although I sympathize with the complaint that one can find many cases of poor data collection in the linguistics literature, I am not sure that any of (i)–(iii) is correct. A surprising number of the critiques that I have read present no evidence of the supposed damage that informal intuitions have caused, and among those that do provide specific examples it is rare to find clear evidence of the lasting impact of questionable judgments. (Phillips 2009: 3)