Notes on the historical and methodological background of biolinguistics

The purpose of this paper is to point out that there are at least four discernible intellectual traditions, i.e., logical positivism/logical empiricism, American structural linguistics, the mathematical theory of computation/computer sciences, and ethology (a biological study of animal behavior) in the historical and methodological background of biolinguistics. I will show that these intellectual traditions seem to have some essential conceptual and methodological characteristics which have resemblances to those of biolinguistics, and suggest that it is worth exploring exactly what roles they have played in the formation of biolinguistics in the early 1950s and its subsequent development.