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Re the megathread on the "success criterion" of minimalism, generative grammar, etc. I remember running (as a Ph.D. student at UMD) a one-semester reading group on mathematical linguistics along with @TimTheLinguist. It was attended for a couple of sessions by Norbert Hornstein.1
At the end of the second one (this must have been in 2007?), Norbert thanked us for running an interesting reading group, but expressed that he didn't quite see the point of the effort to develop these formalisms (Lambek-style stuff, mostly) to fussily derive all uttterances.
Rather, his "success criterion" was whether the operations defined in these formalisms reflect/could be unified/analogize more fundamental truths about the universe. Like if it could be shown that they said something about primes or Fibonacci numbers or quantum interactions or...
Then that would make him pay attention and assign value to the exercise.
The point is that the value of these kinds of discussions -- the megathread -- is bound up in the scientific question being asked, the success criterion. If you think linguistic science is mostly about accounting for observed utterances, then obviously Norbert is out to lunch.
People like Norbert on the other hand seem impervious to the "empirical accounting" critique, because the scientific result *they're* looking for (the confirmatory *evidence*) is the connection between language and any number of language and cognition-external patterns.
