> if success is defined as getting a fair approximation to a mass of chaotic unanalyzed data, then it's way better to do it this way than to do it the way the physicists do, you know, no thought experiments about frictionless planes and so on and so forth

This is factually incorrect! For physicists, those thought experiments are absolutely essential, and we would need many, many more orders of magnitude of statistical processing of video signals in order to get close to the real-world-useful physical predictions that we arrive at through thought experiments, equations, and so on. The contrast that Chomsky is missing is that for language, the statistical processing is amazingly successful, and the thought experiment style of investigation, while productive, has not been shown useful in real world tasks like translation.

For those arguing against Chomsky, none of the above means that we should abandon a theory-driven or symbolic approach to language.

If Chomsky and his opponents would just recognise that they have different goals (not just different ways of approaching the same goal), we wouldn't have to have this same argument every few months.