Empiricism, pragmatism, behaviorism

Arne Naess and the growth of American-styled social research in norway after World War II

Fredrik W. Thue

pp. 220-229

in: Juha Manninen, Friedrich Stadler (eds), The Vienna circle in the Nordic countries, Berlin, Springer, 2010

Abstract

Arne Næss is conventionally portrayed as the seminal character of modern Norwegian philosophy. Equally important, however, is his status as a founding father of the social sciences as a distinct academic field in Norway. Shortly after the German invasion Næss gathered an interdisciplinary group of students and junior scholars to scrutinize the foundations of their respective fields of study. After the war the agenda of this group drifted from philosophy toward social research. To introduce a new interdisciplinary complex, known from the United States as the "behavioral sciences", into the national university system became its highest priority. In late 1949 these efforts led to the formation of the Institute for Social Research, which would prove seminal to the development of social psychology, sociology, and political science throughout the following decades. It seems to be a common characteristic of the intellectual situation in all the Nordic countries that Vienna-style empiricist philosophy tended to operate as a gateway to American-style social science. In my master's thesis, now fifteen years old, I studied how this transition from philosophy to social research came about in the Norwegian setting.² My focal argument was that Næss' distinctive epistemological program and the social experience of Fascism and resistance both proved decisive, and that the group's intellectual development could be analyzed in terms of an intriguing dialectic between basic epistemological, ethical, and political attitudes. From 1943 Næss and his students increasingly addressed the practical and normative challenges of postwar society as a special responsibility of philosophers and social scholars. Similar to such proponents of unified science as John Dewey and Karl Popper, they came to see the ethos of empirical research as intrinsically relevant to the basic norms and methods of democratic politics.

Cited authors

Popper Karl

Dewey John

Naess Arne