Naturalism in linguistics has a history of opposition: to abstractness, to generative linguistics, to formalist approaches. The present approach concentrates on a key feature of Natural Linguistics and Natural Phonology in particular, namely the empirical centrality of external evidence. A step further than traditional naturalism is taken, in replacing the Viennese schools of philosophy of science, specifically Logical Empiricism and Critical Rationalism, which typically underlie the metatheory of Natural Phonology, by an ecological view that science is evaluated - intellectually and by the taxpayer - in terms of its operational functionality in personal, social, political and economic environments. The ecological perspective on science is related to applications of linguistics in speech technology.