Historical context
Louis Hjelmslev
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Use formal methods to study sound and meaning
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Strongly opposed to descriptive linguistics
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Linguistic's main task is to find the imminent algebra of linguistics
(glossematics) according to an empirical principle
stating that the theory should be free of contradiction, exhaustive,
and as simple as possible (no mention of relations to real
data).
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"Inductivism" leads to the abstraction of concepts which are
hypostatized as real. Inductivism is generalizing and thus could
never yield an `empirical' description of language (see above).
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"Induction leads not to constancy but to accident".
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Linguistics is "necessarily deductive".