The future of linguistics in the light of its past history

Linguistics, or linguistic science, the study of human language, has been treated throughout its history as a special part of the science of signs, or semiotics as it is now called. As the linguist is also himself a speaker-hearer, language has always been open to investigation either from the outside, working from written or spoken texts recorded from others, or from the inside, in answer to the question What has the speaker-hearer got inside him whereby he controls fluently at least his native language?' From Ancient Greece onward, this contrast in viewpoints has in one way or another manifested itself successively in the empeiríā-téchnē dispute in Antiquity, the auctoresartes controversy in the Middle Ages, the distinction between grammatica civilis and grammatica philosophica in the seventeenth century, and in the attitude of nineteenth century historical linguists towards universalizing philosophical grammars; and it has become all the more marked in the current debate between adherents of the ‘Bloomfieldian’ empiricist school and its successors and the followers of Chomsky and present-day rationalist linguists, especially as regards the study of linguistic universals and Chomsky's insistence that linguistics is properly a branch of cognitive psychology. The currently active study of language from both viewpoints is an excellent augury for the future progress of the subject.