Well, what do you guys think? Linguistics superficially has a lot in common with a lot of the natural sciences. For instance words in a language can be categorized and analyzed quantitatively much as, say, leaf morphology in botany can. Such "natural scientific" activities permit drawing inferences about relations historical between, say, different languages, again much as is done in biology. One can also do similar analyses on behavior - for instance, mating behavior in birds can be subjected to a phylogenetic analysis, much as in the other sciences. But is linguistics reducible to behavior? And even if it is on some level, is it still scientific? Consider for instance trying to discern how the semantics of a term has changed over time - say, "lunatic" which had once upon a time a meteorological connotation to evolve into something about a crazy person. Tracing this shift, in terms of scouring the literary sources, has a lot in common with the humanities e.g., literature and poetry. An approach to study the evolution of "lunatic" has more to gain probably from studying it the way art historians study representations of Bacchus through the ages than how botanists study the diversity of leaf morphology. Thoughts?
I believe linguistics is a natural science (I haven't studied lots of things so I'm not a pro or something). Some of the few valuable things I learned in school is that ancient greeks were taking words in a very serious manner. They were analyzing the words like they were something alive (they were seeing their thoughts in these words). I don't know if this counts as scientific method but here's an example of what I'm talking about (if you don't understand please tell me so I can explain it in a better way). Aristoteles was using the words ethics to express how individuals should best live from the prospective of society. Ethics is a root of the verb έχω (eho) which means have. Ethics create the character and you get ethics by doing something multiple times (if you see an elder people that have difficulty with something and you help over and over again at some point you will automatically help an elder person when you see him/her having trouble without even blinking). Basically he used the word ethics from the word έχω (have) because he wanted to show that you must "own"-possess something (by doing it multiple times). From the word έχω ancient greeks generated the word σχήμα (shape) which also comes from the idea of "giving shape to your character by possessing/having/owning certain habits" (here we go with ethics again). This is just a tiny example of why linguistics can be thought as a natural science (as I said above I'm not a pro so I might be talking bullshit and I don't know it).
While some sections of linguistics are heavily involved in social sciences, there are areas that more heavily touch on neuroscience and psychology.
