Theoretical linguistics uses an epistemological framework consisting of the modern experimental method combined with premodern ordinary language justification. Natural language syllogisms are not accepted for justification in the hard sciences, however. It is argued that they should not be accepted in theoretical linguistics either. Computational linguistics is proposed as a possible way for bridging the gap. The study of Romance clitics is used an example to illustrate the merits and challenges of the proposed methodology. Specifically, a Python based analysis of the clitic data is presented whose correctness is verified by deductive calculations performed by a computer