This book argues that positivism, though now the dominant paradigm for both the natural and the human sciences, is intrinsically unfit for the latter.

Pieter A.M. Seuren (1934-2021) was a Dutch linguist. He was Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, and research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He laid down his formal, ecologically and historically motivated linguistics in many published articles and in a wide-ranging series of 15 books, among them, Operators and Nucleus (1969), Discourse Semantics (1985), Semantic Syntax (1996), his historical monograph Western Linguistics (1998), his foundational, two-volume Language from Within (2009), From Whorf to Montague (2013) and Saussure and Sechehaye: Myth and Genius (2018).