There is a particular way in which they (i.e. linguists) do, but it’s not comparable to politics, because it’s actually productive. Sometimes you have two competing approaches to a phenomenon, and then people try to extend their own approaches as far as possible, shows that all the data the other wants to explain can be explained in their own terms, etc. This, however, seems to work as a heuristic, in that it makes us explore all the strengths and weaknesses of theories, and it’s also sensible insofar as uniting everything under one view would be more parsimoneous. At some point, we might decide that we’re straining the theories to far and that actually both of them are valid for some cases and the phenomena are less unified than we thought at first. (Or it might turn out that the two approaches lead to notational variants of the same theory when worked out fully.)
There is a particular way in which they (i.e. linguists) do, but it’s not comparable to politics, because it’s actually productive. Sometimes you have two competing approaches to a phenomenon, and then people try to extend their own approaches as far as possible, shows that all the data the other wants to explain can be explained in their own terms, etc. This, however, seems to work as a heuristic, in that it makes us explore all the strengths and weaknesses of theories, and it’s also sensible insofar as uniting everything under one view would be more parsimoneous. At some point, we might decide that we’re straining the theories to far and that actually both of them are valid for some cases and the phenomena are less unified than we thought at first. (Or it might turn out that the two approaches lead to notational variants of the same theory when worked out fully.)