Do You Know Ragnar Rommetveit? On Dialogue and Silence,Poetry and Pedantry,and Cleverness and Wisdom in Psychology (An Interview with Ragnar Rommetveit)

Abstract

Ragnar Rommetveit is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Oslo, Norway. He received his > PhD in 1954 at the University of Oslo, became Associate Professor in the same year, and has continued as Professor of Psychology D since 1959. He developed a hermeneutically based theory of communication as an alternative to representationalcomputational models of language and mind. In fact, he was the founder of the 'dialogical approach' in psychology-long before this notion has become popular in the 1990s. He has been interested in communication, intersubjectivity and the construction of meaning in language use, and was one of the early critics of attempts to formalize the semantic structure of language within the framework of Chomskian generative grammar. Ragnar Rommetveit was Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota (1956-7), at the University of Michigan (1961), and at Cornell University (1964-5). He was Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, USA (1965-6) and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar (1972-3). From 1977 until 1983 he held the title of Andrew Dickson White Professorat-Large at Cornell University. He was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Linkhping, Sweden, in 1982, and by the University of Bergen, Norway, in 1990.