Grammaticality Judgments
When generative grammar was first proposed, it was widely hailed as a way of formalizing the implicit set of rules a person "knows" when they know their native language and produce grammatical utterances in it (grammaticality intuitions). However Chomsky has repeatedly rejected that interpretation; according to him, the grammar of a language is a statement of what it is that a person has to know in order to recognize an utterance as grammatical, but not a hypothesis about the processes involved in either understanding or producing language.
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“Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)