[languagehacker]

I'm a big fan of Karl Popper's work. I learned about him when reading the book Empirical Linguistics by Geoffrey Sampson. At the time, it was a pretty iconoclastic publication, since it directly struck against the assumption of nativism by framing the study of language as something that could be evidence-based in a way where hypotheses were truly falsifiable. The ability to collect and process large amounts of data pertinent to language make it a lot easier to strike down some of the more inscrutable theories of the '90s and '00s -- at least to those who are willing to do real science.

[tgv]

I don't think data collection was linguistics' greatest problem. Getting a lot of data from random places isn't going to help.

[languagehacker]

Having more data and being able to consistency process it actually can say a lot about the hypotheses that linguists have. All other science is evidence-based. The challenge for linguistics has been that many theorists pick and choose armchair examples rather than back their assertions up with statistical validity.