Prediction, Experiment, and Replication in Language Faculty Science: A Conceptual Illustration

The chapter provides a brief conceptual articulation of how we can study the language faculty itself by the basic scientific method, i.e., by deducing definite predictions from our hypotheses and obtaining and replicating experimental results precisely in line with such predictions. The discussion starts out with challenges posed by the fact that the language faculty is a hypothesized object internal to the mind of an individual, and proceeds to address the immediate goal, the nature of hypotheses, predictions, and replication in language faculty science. This leads to a correlational methodology, involving comparisons of an individual's judgments about different types of meaning relations. The methodology is then illustrated based on my own self-experiment. The subsequent discussion about how the self-experiment is the most fundamental experimental activity in language faculty science and how we try to replicate the result of the self-experiment is meant to be a response to the widely-held conception that experiments dealing with “language” must deal with a number of participants. The proposal about language faculty science as a categorical science is in turn meant to be a response to another widely-held belief that the mind cannot be studied in a categorical manner.