At the metatheoretical level, linguistics is often portrayed as one natural science among others; speakers are claimed to be governed by a blind ´language instinct`; and it is assumed, accordingly, that their behavior can be exhaustively described in physico-biological terms (as shown inter alia by the current tendency to reinterpret the term "cognitive" as ´neurological`).

In this book Esa Itkonen argues that the general view outlined above is fundamentally false. His argument, based on the normativity of language, consists in pursuing the many ramifications of this difficult concept. Norms are inherently social entities; they may be broken by acts of free will; they are accessible to conscious intuition; intuition is a type of `knowing-that`, on the one hand, and a type of ´agent´s knowledge´, on the other; empathy, as a related type of agent's knowledge, opens up the possibility to understand alien languages and cultures; empathy, when fully spelled out, culminates in so-called rational explanation. The level of normativity constitutes the ineluctable presupposition for doing any kind of linguistic research. This fact can be ignored only at the cost of giving a distorted picture of what linguistics is about. It goes without saying that the social level of language as well as the psychological one are underlain by a neurological substratum. But this has never been denied. The general argument is complemented by case studies on the philosophy of typological linguistics and on the philosophy of phonology.