In Language and empiricism after the Vienna Circle, Siobhan Chapman identifies the early 20th century Vienna Circle (Carnap et al.) as the philosophical antecedent of empirical studies of “natural” language. While the influence of this philosophical movement is more immediately identifiable in its positive form as the logical positivism of “the standard view of language,” its negative, albeit indirect, impact is far more significant, according to Chapman. This negative influence came in the form of an intellectual resistance to the Vienna Circle, which gave rise to both the “intuitive” or “introspective” form of J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, and the empirical form of sociolinguistics.

It is the indirect influence of the Vienna Circle on empirical studies of language that, Chapman stresses, is her more novel contribution. Through an analysis of the lesser-known work of proto-sociolinguist Arne Naess, Chapman demonstrates how a common ancestry in Vienna leads to both the introspective (Austin) and the empirical (Naess) approaches to resisting logical positivism in language while also justifying their methods on the basis of their “scientific” validity. Despite their wide divergences in assumptions, methods, and conclusions, this common “scientism” indicates an incompletely acknowledged common ancestry in the Vienna Circle.

Chapman describes the inductive method of Naess’s Oslo School of linguistic philosophy as gathering through street interviews oral responses to the question “What is the common characteristic of that which is true?” (p. 115). While the purpose of this research was demonstrably to ascertain commonsense notions of “truth,” Chapman points out that the lasting value of Naess’s work is realized not in its challenge to traditional philosophical notions of truth, but in its challenge to philosophical methodology. It is both this dissatisfaction with the philosophical assumptions about truth and anti-empirical methods that unite Naess with Austin as a fellow critic of the Vienna Circle. While, by contrast, the true work of the linguist in Austin’s theory takes place in the “armchair” – through intuiting and imagining ordinary language use – Chapman nevertheless argues that this represents a relative “scientism,” given that it marks a preference for “ordinary language philosophy” over metaphysical speculations about language. Despite the obvious contrasts, then, between this and the sociolinguistic method of Naess’s Oslo School, Chapman parallels the underlying views of language represented by these two contemporary and competing responses to the Vienna Circle’s logical positivism.

The main significance of this work lies Chapman’s identification of a disciplinary coherence in both the language philosophy of the Vienna Circle and sociolinguistics. By foregrounding the work of Arne Naess, Chapman shows that linguistic empiricism bears an integral disciplinary link to philosophy. By proposing a primarily philosophical source for a sociolinguistic approach, Chapman contributes to an expansion of sociolinguistics from a linguistic methodology to a philosophical critique.