> You seem to respect everything labeled academic, I assure you, I really don't. > but not all "areas of expertise" and not all "fields" are equally valid --

> You seem to respect everything labeled academic, I assure you, I really don't. > but not all "areas of expertise" and not all "fields" are equally valid -- and surely not just because they are taught in universities, written about in "peer reviewed" journals, and so on. Fully agreed. > Linguistics is closer to soft sciences than the opposite. "Linguistics" spans a range of things from the humanities to the 'soft' sciences (in the sense that psychology and cognitive studies 'soft' sciences) to logic/maths.