Language Sciences

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So what are the scientific questions about language, and how can we answer them?

The scientific question on how humans speak, how they put thoughts in words, how they proceed when trying to solve a problem, and choose to communicate, (or even just write it down), all those very interesting questions are rarely even seriously considered. Some people insist that linguistics is a humanity and not a science — a distinction that makes no sense if we accept that mathematization is what distinguishes science from other forms of knowledge seeking.

Linguistics is the science of human language, in all its aspects. And linguistics has made many discoveries, both concerning unifying principles that apply to all known human languages, and concerning conditional principles that apply to and structure different types of languages.

Importantly, linguistics has also aimed to build a theory of how languages manage to transfer meaning, (a) how they refer to entities, in the real world, or in imaginary worlds (which may not be so different), and (b) how linguistic context by itself conveys meaning by co-occurence and contiguity.

Speaking may mean that we process our experiences through a verbal filter, just as we would use a visual filter if we want to paint them. In this way “raw” experiences may get lost, or rather disappear while being transformed into…