This article was downloaded by: [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ]On: 04 March 2014, At: 06:15Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T3JH, UK

Inquiry: An InterdisciplinaryJournal of PhilosophyPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sinq20

Arne Naess and EmpiricalSemanticsSiobhan Chapman aa University of Liverpool , UKPublished online: 20 Jan 2011.

To cite this article: Siobhan Chapman (2011) Arne Naess and EmpiricalSemantics, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 54:1, 18-30, DOI:10.1080/0020174X.2011.542946

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2011.542946

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form

to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use canbe found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

Inquiry,Vol. 54, No. 1, 18–30, February 2011

Arne Naess and Empirical Semantics

SIOBHAN CHAPMAN

University of Liverpool, UK

(Received 5 May 2010)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Arne Naess’s work in the philosophy of language,which he began in the mid-1930s and continued into the 1960s. This aspect of his workis nowadays relatively neglected, but it deserves to be revisited. Firstly, it is intrinsicallyinteresting to the history of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, because Naessquestioned some of the established philosophical methodologies and assumptions of hisday. Secondly, it suggests a compelling but unacknowledged intellectual pedigree for somerecent developments in linguistics. Naess’s philosophy of language developed from hisreaction against logical positivism, in particular against what he saw as its unempiricalassumptions about language. He went on to establish “empirical semantics”, in whichthe study of language was based on real-life linguistic data, drawn primarily from ques-tionnaires issued to philosophically naïve subjects. He also experimented with methodsfor “occurrence analysis”, but concluded that the collection and analysis of sufficientlylarge bodies of naturally-occurring data was impractical. Empirical semantics was notwell received by Naess’s philosophical contemporaries. It was also seen as being at oddswith contemporary trends in linguistics. However, some present-day branches of linguis-tics have striking resonances with Naess’s work from as much as seventy years ago. Insociolinguistics, questionnaires have become an established means of collecting linguisticdata. In corpus linguistics, advances in technology have made Naess’s unobtainable idealof “occurrence analysis” a viable methodology. Some of the principal conclusions reachedas a result of this methodology are strikingly similar to Naess’s own findings.

I. Introduction

Arne Naess was active in the philosophy of language from early in the 1930sinto the 1960s. During this time he established and led what became known asthe “Oslo School of Philosophy”, centred on Naess’s commitment to “empir-ical semantics”. This comprised not just a philosophical outlook or a seriesof tenets, but in fact a thoroughgoing critique of contemporary establishedphilosophy and a pioneering new approach to philosophical methodology.

Correspondence Address: Siobhan Chapman, University of Liverpool, School of English,Chatham Street, Liverpool, L69 7ZR, UK. Email: src@liverpool.ac.uk

0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/11/010018–13 © 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2011.542946

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

Arne Naess and Empirical Semantics 19

This aspect of Naess’s work is now largely overshadowed by his later work onethics and ecology, and is in fact rarely cited either by philosophers of lan-guage or by linguists. But it merits serious reconsideration, for two distinctreasons. Firstly, in its own right it deserves a place in the history of analyticphilosophy in the twentieth century. Secondly, and perhaps even more strik-ingly, it has resonances with much more recent developments in the disciplineof linguistics, in terms both of methodology and of findings.

This article will consider the philosophical background against whichNaess developed empirical semantics and briefly outline both his views onmethodology and some of his findings. It will survey the generally ratherunenthusiastic reception of Naess’s work among his contemporary philoso-phers and the assumption, which seems to have been mutually held, that hisviews on language were not really consistent with the emergent discipline oflinguistics. Finally, it will argue that a fresh and much more positive assess-ment of empirical semantics is suggested by more recent developments inlinguistics, particularly in the fields of sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.

II. Naess and the Vienna Circle

The key to understanding the motivation for Naess’s development of empiri-cal semantics lies in the work of the Vienna Circle, the group of like-mindedphilosophers and scientists who met regularly in the late 1920s and early1930s. Naess initially admired their dogmatic brand of logical positivism,but he quickly began to react against some of the assumptions and method-ologies on which it was based. This reaction informed the outlook and themethodologies that distinguished empirical semantics.

Naess travelled to Vienna in 1934, soon after graduating from theUniversity of Oslo. He was quickly invited to attend meetings of the ViennaCircle, one of very few outsiders ever to receive such an invitation. At thattime, the Vienna Circle were concerned with distinguishing between state-ments that were philosophically interesting and those that were meaningless.Statements that they considered to be scientifically and therefore philosophi-cally acceptable were those that were capable of being conclusively establishedto be either true or false. This category comprised analytic statements, true byvirtue of the meanings of the words they contained; statements of mathemat-ics and of logic, true by virtue of the formal system to which they belonged;and those synthetic sentences that were not inherently true but were amenableto an identifiable process of verification by observation. All other types ofstatements, including most controversially the statements concerned withreligious and ethical topics, they labelled as “meaningless”, or as “pseudo-statements”. This made the more speculative style of philosophy typicallypracticed in metaphysics anathema to them. As Moritz Schlick, the leaderof the Vienna Circle, had expressed it a few years earlier: “The empiricist doesnot say to the metaphysician ‘what you say is false’, but ‘what you say asserts

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

20 Siobhan Chapman

nothing at all!’ He does not contradict him, but says ‘I don’t understand you’”(Schlick, 1932, p. 107).

Naess was troubled by the dismissal of much of what was said in philo-sophical discussion, and by extension much of what was said in everyday life,as pseudo-statements. It seemed to him that if an idea could be expressed inordinary language it must be worth analysing, and should not be too easilydismissed by philosophers. The Vienna Circle’s sweeping application of theterm “meaningless” ignored how language was actually used and understood.As such, for all the Vienna Circle’s claims to rigid empiricism, their dogmasrested on some unempirical assumptions about language. As Naess put itin an interview many years later: “They imagined they had perfect knowl-edge of ordinary language about their mother tongue. So, to me, they wereanti-empirical, as they thought that their analysis of the use of ‘or’, for exam-ple, was much deeper than what you could get from statistics” (Naess, inRothenberg, 1993, p. 28).

For Naess, a truly empirical approach to language, and therefore a validmeans of assessing the statements it could be used to make, must be basedon available evidence of how it is actually used, rather than on the intuitivepreconceptions favoured by the Vienna Circle. The reference to “statistics” inthe above quotation is telling. At much the same time, Naess began to thinkabout ways in which empirical data about language could in practice be col-lected and analysed. In this connection he developed an interest in the thenrelatively new discipline of sociology, in which empirical evidence was col-lected by presenting subjects with questionnaires and subjecting the resultsof these questionnaires to statistical analysis. In considering this method asa possible source of evidence about language, Naess was going well beyondwhat counted as legitimate in the Vienna Circle’s tightly constrained accountof scientific methodology. Naess urged that any method of gathering infor-mation that was relevant to the subject under study should be consideredpermissible. A later review of a book that he initially wrote at about this timesummarised his position: “Naess thus gives priority to research areas not toany specific ‘scientific’ method” (Storheim, 1959, p. 190).

Naess’s interest in the ordinary use of language, his unease with philo-sophical pronouncements that he considered to be unempirical and hiscommitment to the use of questionnaires to collect data and statistics toanalyse them were all in place by the middle of the 1930s. These three fac-tors underpinned everything that was to happen subsequently in empiricalsemantics.

III. Naess on “truth”

Naess’s first major work of empirical semantics concerned the philosophi-cally loaded term “truth”, and was published in 1938 in a monograph entitled“Truth” as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers. Naess

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

Arne Naess and Empirical Semantics 21

was perplexed both by the large and diverse number of claims to be found inphilosophy about the proper definition of “truth”, and also by the tendencyof professional philosophers to make confident but unsupported pronounce-ments about the common, or non-philosophical conception of “truth”. Heargued that any philosophical account of truth must be based on knowledgeof how ordinary people use and understand the term. Because simple observa-tion of linguistic usage was unlikely to yield enough evidence about “truth” tobe statistically interesting, he argued that such knowledge was best obtainedby questioning a sample of ordinary people about their understanding of theterm. Naess assembled a group of 250 informants, importantly all withoutany formal philosophical training, and collected evidence of their responsesto a variety of experiments involving questionnaires. The most significant ofthese was to record the informant’s response to the question: “What is thecommon characteristic of that which is true?” (Naess, 1938, p. 23).

Naess collated the responses and categorised them into thirty-seven dif-ferent response types. The following summaries of these types, expressed inNaess’s own words, are representative:

response: agreement with realityresponse: agreement with the facts of the caseresponse: that they can be provedresponse: agreement between statement and observationresponse: what I perceive directly by my sensesresponse: scientists’ statementsresponse: what the majority saysresponse: it serves liferesponse: a thing that must and ought to be accepted by all(Naess, 1938, pp. 42–4 and 66–8)

Naess concluded, firstly, that professional philosophers were simply wrongwhen they claimed without empirical support to know how the term “truth”is ordinarily conceived of outside philosophical discussions. There simplywas no such thing as a single, identifiable, ordinary conception of “truth”.Secondly he argued that the types of response that he had collected from ordi-nary people were in fact remarkably similar, despite differences in phrasingand in sophistication of expression, to many of the major philosophical the-ories of truth. Naess identified in his informants’ responses theories of truthallied to those of pragmatism, relativism and logical positivism itself, amongothers.

Reviews of “Truth” as Conceived by Those Who Are Not ProfessionalPhilosophers in the academic journals were generally not favourable. This isperhaps not surprising, given the implication of Naess’s work that seriousconsideration of one of the central topics of philosophy was not exclusive toprofessional philosophers. However, reviewers tended to comment on Naess’sunconventional methodology rather than his findings or more specific claims.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

22 Siobhan Chapman

Ernest Nagel predicted that Naess’s working practice would not be generallywell received: “This is an interesting book, not without amusing features . . .[but Naess] will no doubt remain an outcast from the philosophical commu-nity” (Nagel, 1939, pp. 78 and 79). Jared Moore was harsher in his criticism:“The author tries desperately hard to be ‘scientific’, but seems to have littleto show for it when all is done and recorded” (Moore, 1939, p. 490). Naesshimself had no doubt that the hostile reception of his book was due to thechallenges it posed to the philosophical establishment, in terms both of itsmethodology and of its broader implications:

I used questionnaires. At that time, 1937–38, they were looked upon asthe absolute bottom of doing research. They couldn’t be taken seriouslyat all. And then it implied that I had an undignified, really atrociousview of one of the great problems of humanity—namely, the problemof truth. Taking seriously what those schoolboys and housewives weresaying was a kind of caricature of philosophy. (Naess, in Rothenberg,1993, p. 49)

IV. Later work

Naess was not deterred either from his commitment to the empirical studyof language as a basis for philosophical inquiry or from his belief that philo-sophical discussion could and should be democratised to include the voices ofnon-philosophers. He remained convinced that knowledge of language had nospecial status; like knowledge of any other natural phenomenon it must drawon evidence from observation and data collection. He continued throughoutthe 1940s, 1950s and 1960s to develop and refine his use of questionnairesas a means of collecting this data. In many publications he makes an explicitcase for this methodology, arguing for instance that data collected using ques-tionnaires “are often apt to reveal or suggest as much to the researcher as dopenetrating meditations or introspections based on data found in one’s ownhead or gathered in an informal way” (Naess, 1960, p. 481; see also Naess,1949, 1953, 1956, 1956/8, 1957, 1961).

During his work on “truth” he had become convinced that the mean-ings of words, even philosophically salient words like “truth” itself, were notfixed, but varied according to factors such as situation, purpose and, cru-cially, individual producer and interpreter. He developed the thesis that theextent to which meaning could be clearly identified, or what he called the“preciseness” of meaning, was a matter of degree. Different degrees of pre-ciseness were found in, and were appropriate to, different types of languageuse. Formal philosophical discussion, for instance, required a relatively highdegree of preciseness, whereas casual everyday conversation would tolerate amuch lower level. He consulted informants using questionnaires concerningtheir awareness of the preciseness of their own interpretations. Often these

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

Arne Naess and Empirical Semantics 23

questionnaires were presented in laboratory conditions, but sometimes Naessmade an attempt to capture the responses of subjects involved in real life con-texts of language use, as this striking account of an experiment conducted inthe 1950s illustrates:

The experimenter announced a lecture to an association of students ofphysics, and about 250 gathered in an auditorium. After talking forabout twenty minutes the lecturer said: “The earth is surrounded bya gravitational field” in a rather natural context, but without particularstress. This was a signal to a mob of assistants to invade the gather-ing with copies of a questionnaire which were handed to the students.The basic question read: “How did you interpret the utterance ‘Theearth is surrounded by a gravitational field’?” “Do any of the followingsentences convey to you what the utterance conveyed to you?”

Two classes of answers are of particular interest, the “I do notknow” answers and the “no discrimination” answers. They reveal thelimits of the definiteness of interpretation among hearers. (Naess,1981, p. 143–44)

Naess was particularly interested in these two types of negative answerbecause they suggested the extent to which subjects can attend to languageuse and apparently understand it, at least to their own satisfaction, with verylittle preciseness, or definiteness of interpretation at all.

His next major work was Interpretation and Preciseness, circulated in aseries of mimeographed studies in the years following the Second World Warand eventually published in a single volume in 1953. In this, Naess turnedhis attention to two key topics in the philosophy of language: the validityof synonymity and the credibility of the distinction between analytic andsynthetic sentences. Both topics were focuses of interest and controversy inmid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. In his own approach to them,Naess made use of his interest in the degrees of preciseness identifiable inthe production and interpretation of language. Both synonymity and analyt-icity depend on a notion of linguistic meaning that is fixed or determinate.Linguistic expressions cannot be said to be synonymous, or to have the samemeaning as each other, if they cannot first be said to have an identifiable mean-ing. Analytic statements are those that depend for their truth on the meaningsof the words they contain; again, they depend on the possibility of establish-ing meaning a priori. Naess developed a series of questionnaires by which totest the validity of synonymity and analyticity in terms of people’s actual useand understanding of language. Typically, these focused on some particularpair of words or expressions, and asked subjects to consider what effect sub-stituting these expressions for each other would have for their interpretationof example texts. For example, in the question quoted below, “U” and “T”are variables for which any pair of potentially synonymous expressions can

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

24 Siobhan Chapman

be substituted. Subjects were asked to read and consider a particular shorttext that contained the expression “T”. Then they were asked: “Suppose theformulation U (here, U is mentioned) had occurred in the text instead of T,and in T’s place. Would U have expressed the same proposition to you as Tdid when you read T?” (Naess, 1947/51, vol. 1, p. 10).

Naess found that his subjects were sometimes prepared to say that sub-stituting one expression for another in a text would leave the propositionunchanged, or in effect that the two expressions were synonymous. But hefound that such judgments were not fixed; they varied between individualsubjects and between the contexts provided by the sample texts. Naess’s con-troversial conclusion was that synonymity did exist, but that it was a matterof degree; it was possible to describe pairs of expressions as being more or lesssynonymous with each other, relative to people and to context.

If T0 and T1 is [sic] synonymous within the group of persons P1, andwithin the group of situations S1, whereas U0 and U1 is synonymouswithin a group of persons P2 and a group of situations S2, none ofwhich are totally included in P1 or S1, but at least one of which includesat least one of the groups P1 or S1, then it is said that the relation ofsynonymity between U0 and U1 extends further than that between T0and T1. (Naess, 1947/51, vol. 1, p. 18)

If synonymity varied in extent with context, it followed that analyticity toomust be relative. The relationship between a pair of expressions might servein some contexts to make a sentence containing them analytic, but need notnecessarily do so in every possible context. So Naess’s second and equallycontroversial conclusion was the following: “An expression can be analytic inrelation to some rules but synthetic in relation to others” (Naess, 1966, p. 75).Naess’s empirical approach to semantics could hardly have taken him furtheraway from the dogmas of logical positivism, which relied on a settled notionof analyticity for one of its criteria of meaningfulness.

Naess devoted a lot of attention in Interpretation and Preciseness to the cur-rent and potential methodologies of empirical semantics. He acknowledgedthat, despite its advantages, there were drawbacks to the reliance on question-naires; in particular, people who were perfectly capable of using and under-standing an expression were not always able to give a useful account of howthey did these things. Ideally, questionnaires should be replaced, or at leastsupplemented, by data drawn from a collection of actual spontaneous usesof a particular expression under investigation, such as from published textsthat were produced for other, non-philosophical purposes. However, the taskof collecting, collating and analysing sufficient quantities of data to performwhat Naess termed “occurrence analysis” was simply prohibitive. He con-sidered possible approaches to the problem, such as storing occurrences onseries of index cards, but concluded that the process remained impracticable.Occurrence analysis might be an ideal for the empirical semanticists, but:

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

Arne Naess and Empirical Semantics 25

“The non-existence of a method by which meanings can be ‘seen’ by obser-vation of use is one of the strong reasons not to abandon the synonymityquestionnaire” (Naess, 1947/51, vol. 6, p. 2).

The topics that Naess was working with in the middle part of the twenti-eth century were absolutely central to the concerns of contemporary analyticphilosophy. The conclusions he was reaching were striking, and had some-thing in common with ways in which other philosophers were questioning theassumptions of formal approaches to language such as the one espoused bythe Vienna Circle. Certainly, Naess’s work was cited by and drew responsesfrom some of the leading analytic philosophers of the time. But their reac-tions continued to be in general wary, hostile or dismissive; Naess remainedthe philosophical outsider that Nagel had predicted he would be.

Rudolf Carnap, a prominent member of the Vienna Circle and a strongearly influence on Naess’s philosophical development did express interest inempirical semantics, and maintained a friendly correspondence with Naess.However, Naess himself was convinced that Carnap never fully appreciated,or at least never fully acknowledged, the extent of the challenge that his workon truth and other topics posed to logical positivism. In fact, Carnap seemsto have purposely marginalised and even suppressed Naess’s work. Naessrecalled how at a conference in the 1930s Carnap dissuaded him from present-ing the work that would lead to “Truth” as Conceived by Those Who Are NotProfessional Philosophers: “I agreed, having the feeling that nobody wouldthink it even meaningful to do empirical research on ordinary language”(Naess, 1981, p. 145, emphasis in original).

The American philosopher W. V. O. Quine might have been expected to bemore sympathetic. He had himself criticised logical positivism for its unempir-ical assumptions, and had argued that the study of language should proceedby means of linguistic fieldwork. But his own methodology remained verymuch that of the armchair philosopher, and he caricatured Naess as respond-ing to the question of how language should be studied with a simplistic “askthe natives” (Quine, 1970, p. 392).

At much the same time as Naess was circulating the mimeographed studiesthat constituted Interpretation and Preciseness, J. L. Austin was pioneering themethods of “ordinary language philosophy” at Oxford. Like Naess, he wasinsistent on the importance to philosophers of consulting everyday usage,but he had very different ideas as to how this should be done. WhereasNaess shunned professional philosophers as informants, Austin relied almostexclusively on the intuitions of himself and a select group of his colleagues.Geoffrey Warnock reported how Austin “was careful to distinguish the pro-gramme he had in mind from the kind of Gallup-poll, empirical team workwhich Naess believed in, and which Austin regarded as, in principle, mis-guided” (Warnock, 1963, p. 14n.; see also Warnock, 1973, p. 43; Urmsonet al., 1965, p. 80). Naess’s enthusiasm for finding out about the intuitionsof ordinary people on philosophical matters seems to have been the main

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

26 Siobhan Chapman

reason why Austin wanted to disassociate ordinary language philosophy fromempirical semantics.

V. Naess and linguistics

If empirical semantics was greeted with little enthusiasm by the philosophi-cal establishment, it also seemed to have little in common with contemporarylinguistics. As Naess and other philosophers of the Oslo School continued todevelop their empirical methodologies during the 1950s and into the 1960s,linguistics became dominated by the new mentalist approach pioneered byNoam Chomsky. According to this, language existed primarily as an inter-nal structure of knowledge in the mind of the speaker, determined by innatemental properties. Actual instances of language use might provide some indi-rect clues as to the nature of this structure, but were subject to a varietyof performance factors and were ultimately of little interest to the linguist.This approach was certainly not compatible with Naess’s insistence that itwas possible to discuss language only in relation to the specifics of contextand speaker. This incompatibility was noted by Hans Skjervheim in a latercommentary:

The general view upon language which is the working presuppositionof Interpretation and Preciseness is just the opposite of the fundamen-tal principles of structuralist linguistics. Naess argues that only speechoccurrences have a real existence; language is a rational reconstructionbased on speech occurrences, thus it is a fictitious entity. (Skjervheim,1982, p. 129)

Skjervheim in fact criticised Naess for failing to engage with contemporarylinguistics. In his reply, Naess indicated that he was from the start aware of theincompatibilities, and for that reason chose not to participate in mainstreamlinguistic discussion. “My kind of detailed empirical studies of terms suchas ‘true’, ‘it is the case’, ‘certain’, ‘democracy’ could scarcely contribute tostructural linguistics. Strictly speaking there was, however, no such interestingopposition as suggested by Skjervheim” (Naess, 1982, p. 147).

However, some developments in linguistics subsequent to Chomsky’s ini-tial influence, and subsequent also to Naess ceasing active engagement in theacademic study of language, are remarkably close in both methodology andfindings to claims Naess was making as much as seventy years ago. Variousfields of linguistics have in recent decades urged the importance of studyinglanguage in context and of consulting observable evidence of language use,in part in reaction to Chomsky’s attempt to restrict linguistic inquiry to intu-itively consulted judgments of grammaticality. Here we will consider brieflysociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.

Sociolinguistics locates language in the context of social practice more gen-erally, and necessarily relies on data concerning how people behave and react

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

Arne Naess and Empirical Semantics 27

linguistically in various social settings. The pioneers of sociolinguistics wereclosely concerned with how such data should best be collected. Drawing,like Naess, on established practice in sociology, they identified a variety ofrelevant methods, which Joshua Fishman summarised at the start of the 1970sas “participant observation, survey methods, experimental designs and depthinterviews” (Fishman, 1971, p. 6). The use of questionnaires to gather datafrom naïve subjects has become established as a central methodology in soci-olinguistics. However, it is striking that sociolinguistic methodology has fromthe start been seen as properly pluralistic. Writing at much the same timeas Fishman, leading sociolinguist William Labov argued that “data from avariety of distinct sources and methods, properly interpreted, can be usedto converge on right answers to hard questions” (Labov, 1972, p. 119). Thischimes with Naess’s early eclecticism in relation to scientific method, noted byStorheim as a feature of his work in the 1930s, and also with his later interestin mixing the use of questionnaires and occurrence analysis: “Generally . . . itis convenient to use questionnaires at first, and then go into occurrence anal-ysis, or to mix both methods during all the stages of the investigation” (Naess,1947/51, vol. 6, p. 52).

Corpus linguistics is one of the newest branches of linguistics, and is alsothe one that has the most in common with empirical semantics. Developmentsin computer technology in the last two or three decades have made possiblethe storage, sorting and analysis of huge bodies of naturally occurring texts inmachine-readable form; modern corpora often amount to many millions ofwords each. In effect, corpus linguistics has made Naess’s unobtainable idealof occurrence analysis a reality, with computers obviating the need for cum-bersome and limited systems of filing cards, and the size of corpora makingpossible the analysis of significant samples of linguistic usage. Corpus lin-guists claim that studying such samples gives a unique access to the natureof a language. In fact, they claim that concordances, the sorted outputs ofcorpus analysis, are the only source of information about many linguisticpatterns that are not otherwise apparent: “A major part of the patterningrevealed by concordances is the extent of phraseology, which is not obviousto speakers, and has indeed been ignored by many linguists” (Stubbs, 2001,p. 153). Commenting in an interview on his motivations during the 1950s,Naess claimed that examining occurrences of language use reveals “rules thatwe as users of ordinary language don’t know anything about, even though weuse the words all day long” (Naess, in Rothenberg, 1993, p. 27).

There are also striking similarities between empirical semantics and cor-pus linguistics in terms of the conclusions drawn about language, and aboutmeaning in particular. Naess’s work on truth in the 1930s convinced him thatmeanings were not fixed; meanings, and in fact language itself were alwaysrelative to contexts, producers and interpreters. This was the conviction thatmarked his point of departure from logical positivism, and that later madehis work incompatible with Chomskyan linguistics. But corpus linguists, too,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

28 Siobhan Chapman

have argued for the mutability and instability of meaning. Wolfgang Teubert,for instance, has claimed, as a central tenet of corpus linguistics: “There isno true and no fixed meaning. Everyone can paraphrase a unit of meaninghowever they like, therefore the meaning of any lexical item type is alwaysprovisional” (Teubert, 2005, p. 6–7). In Interpretation and Preciseness, Naessargued that context was paramount in determining how a word could be inter-preted: “A great deal of plausible interpretations of the words isolated fromthe sentence are not plausible in that particular context defined by the sen-tence” (Naess, 1947/51, vol. 1, p. 32). Corpus linguists have even replicatedin more detail Naess’s challenge to the idea of synonymity, or at least to theidea that synonymity is a fixed category to which certain pairs of expressionsbelong: “Corpora have been used to detect subtle semantic distinctions innear synonyms” (McEnery et al., 2006, p. 103).

Linguistics remains, of course, a multifaceted discipline. Work is still beingconducted both in the broadly Chomskyan framework of mentalism and inthe more empirical approaches represented by sociolinguistics and corpus lin-guistics. (For a discussion of the diversity of current approaches to linguistics,and of the relative positions of these two broad traditions, see Chapman,2008.) Mentalist linguists are in general ready to identify a broader philo-sophical context for their work. Chomsky himself, for instance, has drawnattention to his place in a tradition of rationalist philosophy, particularlyin relation to the Enlightenment and the work of Descartes (for instance,Chomsky, 1966). Empirical linguists generally have less to say about theirphilosophical pedigree. However, a scrutiny of empirical semantics suggeststhat it can be seen as an intellectual forerunner by those working in someof the more empirical branches of linguistics. These recent developments inlinguistics have, in turn, something to offer to our understanding of empiri-cal semantics; they suggest that it is time for a revision of Naess’s status asan outsider to established ways of studying language. Present-day linguistsare carrying out work that Naess aspired to but was not able to see throughbecause of the technological restrictions of his time. In some cases, their actualfindings resonate closely with Naess’s unfashionable hunches and predictions.Naess’s philosophy of language was innovative, unprecedented and very con-troversial in the middle of the twentieth century. But it is highly pertinent tosome of the major ways in which the academic study of language is currentlybeing conducted.1

Note

1. I am grateful for very helpful comments on and discussion of earlier versions of this paperfrom audiences at the English Language Research Seminar and the Stapledon PhilosophyColloquium at the University of Liverpool in March 2006, and at the Arne Naess MemorialSeminar in Oslo in June 2009. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers forInquiry and, in particular, Kristian Bjørkdahl, for their help in preparing this paper forpublication.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

Arne Naess and Empirical Semantics 29

References

Chapman, S. (2008) Language and Empiricism: After the Vienna Circle (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan).

Chomsky, N. (1966) Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (NewYork: Harper & Row).

Fishman, J. (1971) “A sociology of language”, Language in Sociocultural Change, pp. 1–15(Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Labov, W. (1972) “Some principles of linguistic methodology”, Language in Society, 1,pp. 97–120.

McEnery, T., Xiao, R. & Tono, Y. (2006) Corpus-Based Language Studies (London: Routledge).Moore, J. (1939) “Review of ‘Truth’ as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers

by Arne Ness” [sic], The American Journal of Psychology, 52, pp. 489–90.Naess, A. (1938) “Truth” as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers (Oslo:

Jacob Dybwad).Naess, A. (1947/51) Interpretation and Preciseness, vols. 1–6 (Oslo: Universitetets studentkon-

tor). Published in (1953) in a single volume (Oslo: Jacob Dybwad). Reprinted in (2005) TheSelected Works of Arne Naess, vol. 1 (Berlin: Springer).

Naess, A. (1949) “Toward a theory of interpretation and preciseness”, Theoria, 15, pp. 220–41.Naess, A. (1953) An Empirical Study of the Expressions “True”, “Perfectly Certain” and

“Extremely Probable” (Oslo: Jacob Dybwad).Naess, A. (1956) “Synonymity and empirical research”, Methodos, 8, pp. 3–22.Naess, A. (1956/8) “Logical equivalence, intentional isomorphism and synonymity as studied by

questionnaires”, Synthese, 10, pp. 471–79.Naess, A. (1957) “Synonymity as revealed by intuition”, The Philosophical Review, 66, pp. 87–93.Naess, A. (1960) “Typology of questionnaires adopted to the study of expressions with closely

related meanings”, Synthese, 12, pp. 481–94.Naess, A. (1961) “A study of ‘or’”, Synthese, 13, pp. 49–60.Naess, A. (1966) Communication and Argument (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget).Naess, A. (1981) “The empirical semantics of key terms, phrases and sentences”, in: S. Kanger &

S. Öhman (Eds.), Philosophy and Grammar, pp. 135–54 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel PublishingCompany).

Naess, A. (1982) “Pluralism in cultural anthropology”, in: I. Gullvåg & J. Wetlesen (Eds.), InSceptical Wonder, pp. 147–54 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget).

Naess, A. (1993) “Logical empiricism and the uniqueness of the Schlick seminar: A personalexperience with consequences”, in: F. Stadler (Ed.), Scientific Philosophy: Origins andDevelopments, pp. 11–25 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).

Nagel, E. (1939) “Review of ‘Truth’ as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophersby Arne Ness” [sic] The Journal of Philosophy, 36, pp. 78–80.

Quine, W.V.O. (1970) “Methodological reflections on current linguistic theory”, Synthese, 21,pp. 386–98.

Rothenberg, D. (1993) Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press).

Schlick, M. (1932) “Positivism and realism” in: A.J. Ayer (Ed.) (1959), Logical Positivism,pp. 82–107 (Glencoe: The Free Press).

Skjervheim, H. (1982) “Structuralism, empiricism and intentionalism”, in: I. Gullvåg &J. Wetlesen (Eds.), In Sceptical Wonder, pp. 129–46 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget).

Storheim, E. (1959) “Review of Arne Naess Wie fördert man heute die empirische Bewegung? EineAuseinandersetzung mit dem Empirismus von Otto Neurath und Rudolph Carnap”, Theoria,25, pp. 187–91.

Stubbs, M. (2001) “Text, corpora and the problems of interpretation: A response toWiddowson”, Applied Linguistics, 22, pp. 149–72.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4

30 Siobhan Chapman

Teubert, W. (2005) “My version of corpus linguistics”, International Journal of CorpusLinguistics, 10, pp. 1–13.

Urmson, J.O., Quine, W.V.O. & Hampshire, S. (1965) “A symposium on Austin’s method”, in:K.T. Fann (Ed.) (1969), Symposium on J. L. Austin, pp. 76–97 (London: Routledge).

Warnock, G.J. (1963) “John Langshaw Austin, a biographical sketch”, Proceedings of the BritishAcademy, in: K.T. Fann (Ed.) (1969), Symposium on J. L. Austin, pp. 3–21 (London:Routledge).

Warnock, G.J. (1973) “Saturday mornings”, in: I. Berlin (Ed.), Essays on J. L. Austin, pp. 31–45(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UV

A U

nive

rsite

itsbi

blio

thee

k SZ

] at

06:

15 0

4 M

arch

201

4