Abstract
The article invites the reader to contemplate what impedes further development of language science which is currently in a state of stagnation. This crisis is caused by the inadequate methodology used in linguistic research. It defines the paradigm of so-called ‘normal’ science, which suppresses innovation. The dualistic philosophy of external realism continues to be the epistemological foundation of ‘normal’ linguistics, and neither mainstream cognitive science nor cognitive linguistics has been able to break away from it. The author argues that a new, constructivist epistemology is capable of overcoming the crisis and could give a new impetus to further development of language science. This calls for abandoning the traditional view of language as a tool used for the expression and transfer of thoughts. Instead, researchers should use a systems approach to linguistic semiosis as a biological adaptation, which is the organizational basis of humans as living systems at both individual and social levels. Linguistic semiosis is an evolutionary stage in the development of Homo sapiens. Establishing the functional role of linguistic semiosis in systemic cognition as a socially organized living system whose unity is ensured and sustained by its circular (self-referential) organization in the relational domain of language, calls for a radical revision of the extant views on the relationship between language and mind, language and cognition, and language and consciousness. An ecological approach to language assumes that the cognitive dynamics of humans as living systems consists in the adaptive interactional behaviour in the relational domain of linguistic interactions. This domain constitutes the ecological niche of humans as organism-environment systems. It is in this continuously self-constructed human niche that the uniquely human power to reasoning (intelligence) emerges and develops. Humanness rests in language as the creative beginning of the world in which we exist as organisms capable of speech.
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