  The non-nativist language learner as envisaged by Chomsky in the  original version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, in other  words, is limited to a kind of Popperian methodology — one that involves the enumeration of all possible grammatical hypotheses, each of which is tested against the data, and each of is rejected just in  case it is explicitly falsified. As much work in philosophy of  science over the last half century has indicated, though, nothing  much of anything can be learned by this method: the world quite  generally fails to supply falsifying evidence. Instead, hypothesis  generation must be inductively based, and (dis)confirmation is a  holistic matter.