Language and Empiricism - After the Vienna Circle

by Siobhan Chapman

The author offers a new assessment of the influence of the Vienna Circle on language study, and considers its relevance to the debate in present-day linguistics about the relative merits of 'intuitive' and 'real life' sources of data.

196 pages, Hardcover

First published April 17, 2008

About the author

Siobhan Chapman is Reader in English Language at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her main field of research is work in the pragmatics of literature and stylistics.

Reviews

[Nat]

This book's main attraction are the two chapters on the relatively obscure leader of the "Oslo school" of philosophy, Arne Naess, who is clearly a forerunner of experimental philosophy. Naess used surveys and interviews to probe the "ordinary" meaning of philosophically significant expressions like "true" to evaluate philosophers' claims about whether certain theories of truth lined up with the view of truth held by "the man on the street". The following passage could come straight out of the most recent books on x-phi:

"Naess's cental aim in 'Truth' as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers [1938!]was clear and, to the present-day linguist, uncontroversially worthwhile. Philosophers had for centuries made assumptions about what could be summarized as 'the common sense view of "truth"'. These philosophers felt confident in making pronouncements about what those outside of philosophy---'the uneducated', 'the man in the street'---believed about the term 'truth'. A whole array of competing philosophical theories of truth had been presented by means of the rhetorical device of comparing them favorably with this common sense view...Yet there was no evidence, and Naess expressed repeated and perhaps over-emphasized incredulity at this fact, that any of these philosophers had undertaken research into what non-philosophers did actually think about truth". (p.114)

Chapman's discussion of Naess's "emprical semantics" is extremely helpful, because Naess's work is difficult to get your hands on, and even when you have your hands on it, it is not very readable. Indeed, it is "esoteric in the extreme" (p.114). (At Chicago I tried skimming 'Truth' as Conceived by..., which I just stumbled on while browsing the stacks, but I didn't get very far with it.)