He dominated the field of linguistics for decades with anti-empiricist theories. You could argue that the popularity of his ideas held back alternative approaches; hence his contributions could be considered detrimental.

> He dominated the field of linguistics for decades with anti-empiricist theories.

But he dominated. Where was Norvig or IBM's Watson back then?

Unfortunately things like these don't happen in a vacuum. You can only say looking back that this is didn't or that was a bad idea. You should have said that at that time when the theory was advanced or came up with a better one.

We didn't exactly live in in a totalitarian regime where say some Politburo dictated what the official theory about Genetics should be and everyone else gets sacked, and now finally we have freedom from oppression and we can get back on track.

> We didn't exactly live in in a totalitarian regime

Ironically that is something that people allude to with regards to Chomsky (ironic because of his anarchist political beliefs); cf. the book the Linguistics Wars. The bottom line is that his theories were very dominant, not because of overwhelming empirical support, but because of his authority.

I'm not convinced that Chomsky is an 'anti-empiricist.' He's a theorist but his theories have been put to experiment, very successfully so I believe. Can you provide examples of Chomsky attacking the validity of experimental evidence?