Alternative theories (e.g., learners formulating grammatical hypotheses based on statistical information about the primary linguistic data and rejecting them for reasons other than outright falsification, such as lack of explicit confirmation or incoherence with other parts of the grammar) are equally compatible with the argument's negative conclusion.
Primary linguistic data(as used in linguistics and language learning theory)
The actual examples of language that a person hears or reads when learning a language—basically, all the real sentences and conversations they're exposed to.
Statistical information(as used in linguistics and learning theory)
Patterns or trends that show up when you count or measure things across many examples—like noticing that certain words often appear together.
falsification(Deductive logic applied to scientific hypothesis testing)
The logical refutation of a hypothesis h_i by evidence, occurring when b·c·e jointly entail ~h_i, derived via modus tollens from h_i·b·c ⊨ ~e and the observation of e
grammar(Emergentist view, contrasted with the Essentialist view of grammar as a psychologically real generative system.)
An artifact developed by linguists to codify aspects of a linguistic system, not a structure internalized in the minds of speakers.
incoherence(Illustrated by the coexistence of pro-slavery compromises and democratic/equality principles in the US Constitution.)
The condition in which a legal or constitutional document contains provisions that are mutually inconsistent or in tension, resulting from the competing interests of those who drafted it.
Thus arise two problems for the Chomskyan argument. First, it is not all that surprising to discover that if language learners employed a method of conjecture and refutation, then language could not be learned from the data. In other words, the poverty of the stimulus argument doesn't tell us much we didn't know already. Secondly, and as a result, the argument is quite weak: it makes the negative point that language acquisition does not occur via a Popperian learning strategy, but it favo