Empiricism in Linguistics

Abstract

The previous five chapters have traced the impact of the Vienna Circle on the study of language. The approaches discussed were in many ways very different from each other, but they shared both an underlying dissatisfaction with some aspects of what the Vienna Circle had said about language and an impetus to study it in a more genuinely and justifiably empirical manner. According to the usual, questionable divisions between academic subjects, they all belong to the field of philosophy. During the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, many accounts of how language should be studied have of course been developed in the emergent field of linguistics.