  Thus arise two problems for the Chomskyan argument. First, it is not  all that surprising to discover that if language learners employed a  method of conjecture and refutation, then language could not be  learned from the data. In other words, the poverty of the stimulus  argument doesn't tell us much we didn't know already. Secondly, and  as a result, the argument is quite weak: it makes the negative point  that language acquisition does not occur via a Popperian learning  strategy, but it favors no specific alternative to this acquisition  theory. In particular, the argument gives no more support to a  nativist (UG-based) theory than to one that proposed (say) that  learners formulate grammatical hypotheses based on their extraction  of statistical information about the pld and that they may  reject them for reasons other than outright falsification —  because they lack explicit confirmation, or because they do not  cohere with other parts of the grammar, for instance.