The April 4, 1976, issue of Cognition ran an attack by Dresher and Hornstein (D-H) on AI-based linguistic research. There were replies in the May 2, 1977, issue of Cognition by Schank and Wilensky (S-W) and by Winograd (W) and a rebuttal by D-H.
The attack seems to have been interpreted by S-W and W, as well as by other AI researchers, as an all but official statement of the position of Chomsky's interpretivist school (CIS), based mostly in the Northeast. In fact, the tone of the replies would better fit replies to Chomsky himself than to two graduate students at The University of Massachusetts and Harvard. The exchange left out the opinions of linguists, both generative and nongeneratire, outside the interpretivist school--namely, most linguists. It was for this reason that the editors of Cognitive Science asked me to comment briefly on the exchange. I spent many years as a generative linguist and am now sympathetic to much of the AI work on lanugage.
One thing that the exhange never mentioned but that seemed to be lurking in the background was money--in the form of research funding. With government funding sources running low and with a decision by the Sloan Foundation to-pour millions of dollars into Cognitive Science, the competition for research funding has been keen. A number of people I have spoken to, both in the AI and linguistics communities, viewed the timing and nature of the D-H attack as being related to funding issues. Was it an accident that such an attack on AI should come when it did, after AI work had been ignored by transformational linguists for so many years? And why did the attack take the form it did--claiming that AI research was "unscientific"?. Did it have anything to do with the fact that granting institutions with the most money primarily supported "scientific" research? I do not pretend to know the answers to these questions. But whatever the answers are, it is important in understanding the nature of the exchange to know that such questions were on people's minds. The charge of being "unscientific" is not mere name-