Difference between LFS and Linguistics
I have a “poster” in my office that says something like this:
“Ask yourself what hypotheses about the language faculty you are putting forth or adopting, what definite and testable (i.e., disconfirmable) predictions you deduce under those hypotheses, how you design and conduct experiments to test (i.e., try to disconfirm) those predictions, and how you interpret experimental results. If you cannot answer these questions, you are not yet doing language faculty science as an exact science.” (“As an exact science” here is redundant; it is added here for an emphasis.)
When I prepared this, the articulation of the deduction of definite and disconfirmable predictions was lacking, and I was also aware that the articulation of other aspects of LFS research, as alluded to above, and its aspect having to do with (universal) replication, was also insufficient. So, the remarks above were intended at myself than at someone else.
The remarks above focuses on the language faculty as the subject matter of study, and the rigorous-testability(=disconfirmability)-seeking as the core of its adopted methodology. As stated in Section 6 (Summary and Conclusion) of Chapter 4: The key tenets of language faculty science, LFS research focuses on individuals and seek universal replication of definite and categorical experimental results about an individual. It thus seems that this is one way of separating language faculty science and other types of language-related research.