ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the linguistic belief that will be the subject of scrutiny is the belief that language and languages are amenable to scientific study. One of the principal motivations underlying the development of modern linguistics was recognition of the falsification involved in foisting any form of analysis. Language itself being a cultural practice, it was vaguely assumed that linguistic neutrality of the desired kind would or should entail cultural neutrality too. The policy of neutrality was to be adhered to both at home and abroad. Linguistic beliefs are many and varied, since the purposes of participants' linguistic activities are many and varied. The difference between folk and scientific linguistics is interpreted as being roughly analogous to that between folk medicine and scientific medicine. Even within post-Renaissance European culture, the claim that linguistics is, or must endeavour to become, a science of language is open to widely differing interpretations.
