Galen’s Critique of Rationalism and Empiricism, and its Relevance for Modern Linguistics

Methodology in Linguistics, since the late 1950s, has largely followed the model put forward in Chomsky’s early adaptations of the Structuralist approach (Chomsky, 1957, 1965, 1966, 1975; Chomsky and Halle, 1968), though misapplication of the model has resulted in a methodological dichotomy not unlike that between the early Rationalist and Empiricist approaches to anatomy that emerged from Hippocrates’s medical philosophy. In Galen’s critique of the Rationalist and Empiricist sects (see Cosans, 1997), he sought to unify the approaches by eliminating shortcomings in each, and synthesizing what remained. I discuss here the applicability of his critique to the current dichotomy.