Language and Empiricism - After the Vienna Circle

Performativity and the claims of scientificity of modern linguistics

“…As far I can see, the growing prestige of corpus linguistics which I cited as proof for my claim undeniably underscores a summary rejection of theorizing from the top, the hallmark of rationalism (see Chapman, 2008 for a reiteration of this view). But a possible clue to why Lantoff thinks otherwise may be found in a passage from the same review where he dismisses the claim of corpus linguistics as "a theory of anything" and adds that it is only a "research methodology".…”

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 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). Along with Naess, the central empirical semanticists were Herman Tennessen, a psychologist with interests in logical analysis; Ingemund Gullvå g, a logician; and Harald Ofstad, a legal scholar turned moral philosopher (Ofstad, 1951, pp.…”

The emergence of implicit meaning

“…Investigations into scalar implicatures were once considered to be very much a case of armchair linguistics, with examples made up on the basis of the researcher's intuitions (for the notable early exception of Arne Naess, see Chapman 2008).…”