accumulation of data.” The other is structural linguistics, “which has domi-
nated research for the past century, at least until the early 1950s.” Chomsky
(1968/2006: 19–20) acknowledge s its contribu tion as follows:
Structural linguistics has enormously broadened the scope of information
available to us and has extended immeasurably the reliability of such data.
It has shown that there are structural relations in language that can be
studied abstractly. It has raised the precision of discourse about language
to entirely new levels.On the other hand, however, Chomsky clearly notes that its attempt to construct
“discovery procedures,” which are “techniques of segmentation and classifi ca-
tion,” are a failure, “because such techniques are at best limited to the phenomena
of surface structure and cannot, therefore, reveal the mechanisms that underlie
the creative aspect of language use and the expression of semantic content.”
At the same time, despite its failure, Chomsky underscores the importance
of the attempt in the sense that it was directed at the problem of “specifying
the mechanisms that operate on the data of sense and produce knowledge of
language – linguistic competence.” Chomsky (1968/2006: 57) also states that
“a kind of sy nthesis of philosophical grammar and structural linguistics” began
“to take shape” in the late 1960s.
Viewed in the light of the Scientific Revolution, Chomsky’s account indicates
again that biolinguistics has been developing along the lines similar to modern
science during the Scientific Revolution, through the synthesis of structural lin-
guistics, which corresponds to “mathematical and more pragmatic or experiential
sciences”, and a kind of “natural philosophy”, the philosophical grammar. In the
next section, I will show how structural linguistics has been transformed before
it could be amalgamated with what counts as “natural philosophy” in linguistics.
3.2 Methodological parallelism
Now let us turn to the method of biolinguistics. There are at least three meth-
odological parallels between modern science and biolinguistics in their formation.
First, as we saw in section 2.1, just as mathematicians espoused an instru-
mentalist attitude toward mathematical analysis, structural linguists espoused an
instrumentalist attitude toward linguistic analysis. As Freidin (1994:653–654)
notes, Zellig Harr is, a leading structural linguist, for example, states in his
Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951) that “methods of research used in
de scriptive, or more exactly, structural, linguistics” are “the operations which
the linguist may carry out in the course of his investigations, rather than theory
of the structural analyses which result from these investigations.” This statement
suggests that Harris takes an instrumentalist attitude toward linguistic analysis,
just like mathematicians in mathematical sciences, such as astronomy, before
the Scientific Revolution. It is quite interesting to note that Freidin (1994:660)
also argues that Harris “does not adopt the realist position,” whereas “from the
On the current status of biolinguistics 177