philosophy, especially those concerned with the modern period, to emphasize
precisely this relevance. Thus it is now a commonplace that the articulation
of characteristically modern philosophy by Descartes and his successors
must be viewed against the background of the scientifi c revolution of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By emphasizing Descartes’s concern
to replace the Aristotelian-Scholastic natural philosophy with the “mechani-
cal natural philosophy” of the new science, we can achieve a fuller and
deeper understanding of such characteristically modern preoccupations as,
for example, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the
“veil of perception,” the mind-body problem, and so on. Viewed against
the background of the scientifi c revolution that created modern “mecha-
nistic” natural science itself, these modern philosophical preoccupations no
longer appear arbitrary and capricious, as stemming, perhaps, from other-
wise unaccountable obsessions with certainty or with “mirroring reality.”
Instead, they can be understood as natural attempts to come to grips with
a profound reorganization of the very terms in which we conceptualize
ourselves and our world.This passage suggests that seemingly “arbitrary and capricious” modern preoc-
cupations, such as “the distinction between primary and secondary qualities,” can
be more naturally appreciated when viewed against the historical background.
This chapter is an attempt to extend Friedman’s approach to the philosophi-
cal consideration of biolinguistics and its status as a science. I will show that
this approach makes it possible to unify at least some of the methodological
characteristics of biolinguistics noted so far by Chomsky and other generative
linguists into a coherent picture.
The chapter is organized as follows. In section 2, I will briefly show how
modern science was formed in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth
century, explicating some of the relevant characteristics in the formation of the
first conceptual framework of modern science, namely Newtonian dynamics.
In section 3, I will attempt to show that, viewed from the perspective of the
Scientific Revolution, at least some of the methodological characteristics of bio-
linguistics, occasionally mentioned separately in the literature, can be accounted
for in a unified way.
2 The Scientifi c Revolution and the
formation of modern science
A tremendous body of literature has been published on the Scientifi c Revolution.
In particular, Henry (2008) presents a fairly balanced and accessible updated
account. In the following discussion, I will assume Henry ’s (2008) general
picture of the Scientifi c Revolution, adding further details when necessary.
Henry (2008: 1) characterizes the Scientific Revolution as “the name given
by historians of science to the period in European history when, arguably, the
conceptual, methodological and institutional foundations of modern science were
On the current status of biolinguistics 171