It's a question about engineering vs science. Before Kepler, people actually could predict the motion of the stars and planets through the sky; perhaps not as elegantly or accurately as after Kepler, but to a certain degree, so what?
The AI case is clearly a point where the theories from linguistics are insufficient for engineering purposes. Watson could not have been built today based off of Chomskian linguistics. Maybe the statistical models will advance the theory of linguistics, maybe not. Either way they will give us useful tools now which is better than elegant tools later.
The AI case is clearly a point where the theories from linguistics are insufficient for engineering purposes. Watson could not have been built today based off of Chomskian linguistics. Maybe the statistical models will advance the theory of linguistics, maybe not. Either way they will give us useful tools now which is better than elegant tools later.