Linguists seek to establish the general principles governing the organization, emergence, and use of language, including a model of how languages vary across space and time. Language is treated as a natural object, like other cognitive faculties, serving as a natural point of entry into scientific discovery and the tools of scientific reasoning, such as pattern recognition, experimental design, and hypothesis construction and testing. Linguistics serves as a “bridge” discipline between the sciences and the humanities because language is at the center of humanistic inquiry, from philosophy and history to literary theory and language and cultural studies.