Building on the work in Chapters 2 and 3 we now consider how we can take a broadly scientific approach, in Popper’s terms, to the study of language when we have demonstrated that linguistics does not fit easily within his framework. A key step in that process occurs in this chapter when we reconsider linguistics as a social science, though we also give consideration to its role in the digital humanities. Our conception of linguistics as a principally social science shows how we can take linguistics and deal with it in a way broadly in line with the framework specified in Chapters 2 and 3 while also dealing with those elements of it which do not easily fit a natural science framework.

We conclude briefly by reflecting on the overall journey undertaken in the book. Importantly, we conclude with a reminder that what we have presented is one, well worked through model of what it means to use a corpus. We invite the reader who disagrees with this model to take the opportunity to go away, in the spirit in which we began our work in Chapter 1, and argue for different choices to be made and a different coherent model to be proposed.

This chapter summarizes the results from Chapters 4-8 and speculates on a question that is posed at the start of the book: Why is it that Milgrom’s theory, in spite of its remarkable successes, has been so widely ignored by standard-model cosmologists? It is argued that the approach of standard-model cosmologists to theory corroboration is different from that of Milgromian researchers: the first behave like verificationists, the second like critical rationalists. Unlike Milgrom’s theory, the standard cosmological model has made few if any successful novel predictions, and so it is understandable that standard-model cosmologists have gravitated toward a methodology that favors verification over critical rationalism.

Scientific epistemology begins from the idea that the truth of a universal statement, such as a scientific law, can never be conclusively proved. No matter how successful a hypothesis has been in the past, it can always turn out to make incorrect predictions when applied in a new situation. Karl Popper argued that the most important experimental results are those that falsify a theory, and he proposed falsifiability as a criterion for distinguishing science from pseudoscience. Popper argued in addition that scientists should respond to falsifications in a particular way: not by ad hoc adjustments of their theories, but in a way that expands the theory’s explanatory content. Popper argued that the success of a modified theory should be judged in terms of its success at making new predictions. Popper’s view of epistemology, which is shared by many scientists and philosophers of science, is called “critical rationalism.” An epistemology that judges success purely in terms of a theory’s success at explaining known facts is called “verificationism.” Popper argued that verificationism is equivalent to a belief in induction, and that induction is a fallacy.