Quote Originally Posted by DrB0b
Why does this matter anyway? It matters because behavioural psychology, the foundations of modern understanding of the human mind, is intimately linked with Chmoskian Universal Grammar. If there is no universal grammar then much of what we assume about human psychology is based on false premises. Fo me that's a good thing in way - Chomsky has overshadowed the fields of behaviourism and linguistics for so long that he now stifles research (although he himself has said of behaviourism "Whatever 'behaviorism' may have served in the past, it has become nothing more than a set of arbitrary restrictions on 'legitimate' theory construction . . . the kind of intellectual shackles that physical scientists would surely not tolerate and that condemns any intellectual pursuit to insignificance." (Bjork, 1993, p.204))"- if you're not Chomskyan you don't get grants or tenure. For all his apparent openness to new ideas in the field of linguistics he is a jealous God. An upheaval in recursion and universal grammar would breathe new life into these subjects.
The first part, I think gives him far too much credit that he does not deserve.

The second part, which I underlined, seems much closer to the way I'd state it although it seems to be pretty well accepted that his linguistics is just plain wrong. In a similar way that Saussure is plain wrong, but bought many important areas into focus which were developed into real knowledge as a result.

Here's a basic link for some folks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure