Introduction

Abstract

This book is about different attitudes to empiricism in the study of language. It is the product of two apparently unrelated ideas that I have held for some time, voiced on occasion, but had not until recently explored in much detail. The first is that the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle had an impact on the development of present-day linguistics that has not generally been fully recognized. I had a hunch that this impact came about largely indirectly, as a result of adverse reactions to the Vienna Circle from philosophers of language who were more or less contemporary with it. The second idea, and one that is perhaps more widely held, is that disagreements in recent linguistics over the role and nature of data are in many cases wrongly focussed and even unnecessary. Linguists from different traditions are not looking at a single phenomenon and choosing radically different types of data by which to investigate it; they are simply investigating different subjects.