Arne Naess — Dogmas and Problems of Empiricism

Experimental Philosophy*

“…Much happened in this period, so a brief timeline of Naess's activities is in order (see Stadler, 2009). Naess spent his student years in Paris studying philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and astronomy.…”

“…If one wishes to know something about the matter, the traditional methods of attack must be radically and definitely abandoned. (Naess, 1938a, p. 93) In his effort to settle things, Naess interrogated and surveyed ordinary people; he asked them to explicitly state what they think truth is, to state what is common to all that is true, to make synonymity judgments, to evaluate others' definitions; and he tried a variety of other techniques (see Appiah, 2008;Chapman, 2008Chapman, , 2011Stadler, 2009 He took this to show that there was just no thing that deserved to be called the common-sense theory or pre-philosophic conception of truth; so much, then, for the material adequacy condition: 2 (p.331) It is therefore nonsensical to speak of the common sense view of the truth-notion. Equally nonsensical it is to speak of the view of the man in the street, of the uneducated, of the prephilosophic mind etc.…”

“…The most renowned Norwegian philosopher today, Naess was honoured with a state funeral and is well remembered both for pioneering the ecological movement and for his activism in the international peace movement (Stadler, 2009). Naess is also credited with bringing social science methods into Norway, and empirical semantics is considered an intellectual forerunner to sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics (Chapman, 2008(Chapman, , 2011Thue, 2009).…”

Experimental Philosophy

“…If one wishes to know something about the matter, the traditional methods of attack must be radically and definitely abandoned. (Naess, 1938a, p. 93) In his effort to settle things, Naess interrogated and surveyed ordinary people; he asked them to explicitly state what they think truth is, to state what is common to all that is true, to make synonymity judgments, to evaluate others' definitions; and he tried a variety of other techniques (see Appiah, 2008;Chapman, 2008Chapman, , 2011Stadler, 2009). Naess also investigated other factors such as age, gender, suggestibility, and education.…”

“…Arne Naess led the empirical semantics movement. The most renowned Norwegian philosopher today, Naess was honoured with a state funeral and is well remembered both for pioneering the ecological movement and for his activism in the international peace movement (Stadler, 2009). Naess is also credited with bringing social science methods into Norway, and empirical semantics is considered an intellectual forerunner to sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics (Chapman, 2008(Chapman, , 2011Thue, 2009).…”