You Can’t Fight in Here! This is BBS! This is an accepted response to commentaries on Futrell and Mahowald’s Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article “How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models.” Richard Futrell and Kyle Mahowald1 April 1, 2026 Richard Futrell University of California Irvine, USA rfutrell@uci.edu Kyle Mahowald The University of Texas at Austin, USA kyle@utexas.edu Abstract Norm, the formal theoretical linguist, and Claudette, the computational language scientist, have a lovely time discussing whether modern language models can inform important questions in the language sciences. Just as they are about to part ways until they meet again, 25 of their closest friends show up—from linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, and computer science. We use this discussion to highlight what we see as some common underlying issues: the String Statistics Strawman (the mistaken idea that LMs can’t be linguistically competent or interesting because they, like their Markov model predecessors, are statistical models that learn from strings) and the As Good As it Gets Assumption (the idea that LM research as it stands in 2026 is the limit of what it can tell us about linguistics). We clarify the role of LM-based work for scientific insights into human language and advocate for a more expansive research program for the language sciences in the AI age, one that takes on the commentators’ concerns in order to produce a better and more robust science of both human language and of LMs. 1 Introduction Our position is: language models do not replace linguistic theo
And the award for best paper title and abstract in 2026 so far goes to @futrell.bsky.social & @kmahowald.bsky.social and their response to commentaries in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
arxiv.org/pdf/2604.09501
