Holism

Abstract

The mid-twentieth-century debate considered in the previous chapter was concerned primarily with the nature of scientific discovery and progress. In so far as it related to the work of the Vienna Circle, it confronted the problems raised by too dogmatic a commitment to induction, and questioned whether these were best solved by modifying or by overthrowing logical positivism. It engaged with the study of language to the extent that it was concerned with questions of how scientific hypotheses could legitimately be expressed and of the differences between describing a statement as ‘meaningful’ and describing it as ‘scientific’. This debate has influenced the subsequent development of language study, largely because of the interest among some linguists in Popper’s version of falsificationism, but most of its main protagonists were from scientific backgrounds, and they would certainly not have considered themselves to be theorists of language. Popper himself was openly dismissive of language as a focus of study in its own right, repeating in his writings different formulations of the stark dictum that ‘I never quarrel about words’ (Popper 1935: 131 [Addendum, 1972]).