  A lively research field has recently emerged that uses experimental methods
to probe the linguistic behavior of modern deep networks. While work in this
tradition often reports intriguing results about the grammatical skills of deep
nets, it is not clear what their implications for linguistic theorizing should
be. As a consequence, linguistically-oriented deep net analysis has had very
little impact on linguistics at large. In this chapter, I suggest that deep
networks should be treated as theories making explicit predictions about the
acceptability of linguistic utterances. I argue that, if we overcome some
obstacles standing in the way of seriously pursuing this idea, we will gain a
powerful new theoretical tool, complementary to mainstream algebraic
approaches.
