>Why would that be a disingenuous definition?

Doesn't matter if it's disingenuous. What it's implying is ridiculous. It would be more surprising if the linear regression model didn't work at all. The fact that it can correlate fMRI data better than random doesn't mean you've replicated how language works in the brain, let alone how it's acquired.

> In general, your defense of generative linguistics is very weak. It's just invective and strawmen, and it reeks of desperation.

I don't have any horse in the race or anything to be desperate about. It's just an astonishingly stupid proposition.

I should say, I am not qualified to defend or refute generative linguistics (though that clearly was no obstance for the author), and I don't know anything about it. I do feel qualified (because I can read and check sources) to dismiss this embarrassing pile of nonsense, though, as it's just so plainly nonsense that it doesn't take an expert to dismiss its bombastic claims as pseudoscience -- and I'm talking about Piantadosi here and not his references, which, for all I know, are serious research misrepresented by a dunce. I'm not in academia and I don't feel the need to be any more diplomatic about this than he was toward linguists in his pdf-format blog post.