Ragnar Rommetveit: A full life

Beginnings

Rommetveit was born in Stord in 1924, a rural island in the western part of Norway, as the second youngest of nine siblings. Education was important to his family and others in his surroundings. After completing teacher training college, he started his studies in psychology in 1947 at the University of Oslo. At that time in Norway, most students of psychology were interested in practical psychology and entered into clinically oriented programs of study. However, Rommetveit and three fellow students set out on a more theoretical journey directed toward a scientific career. One of these students was Jan Smedslund, who like Rommetveit, later received a chair as professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo. In a recent obituary at the Norwegian Academy of Science, Smedslund gave a vivid description of their early student days. He recounted that their most important teacher was Arne Næss, a professor of philosophy who had a rather relaxed attitude towards authority. Through his seminars on symbolic logic he made a great impact on these young scholars to be. Their contact with the teachers in their department were, however, rather infrequent; the small group of students often depended heavily on one another for their intellectual development. There were frequent group discussions reflecting a rather critical attitude towards their curriculum which at that time was predominantly American. The importance that these group discussions had on Rommetveit’s young inquiring mind is succinctly described by Smedslund (2018):

I think that Ragnar’s independent, actively exploring and searching attitude was further reinforced and developed by the repeated discussions and consistent opposition to established authorities that characterized our small group. He was intensely engaged, but always remained friendly and case-oriented. He was a genuine researcher. (translated to English by Smedslund)

In 1953, Ragnar Rommetveit received his PhD at the University of Oslo. In 1954, at the age of 29, he became an associate professor and was later promoted to professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo. He remained in this position until he retired in 1994.

Scholarly trajectory

Rommetveit did not strive to build a separate school of thought. Indeed, for much of his career he positioned himself outside of mainstream schools of psychology, linguistics, and communication by subjecting them to ongoing critique. He was nevertheless invited to give keynote lectures at the most distinguished universities and conferences. At the same time he enjoyed the format of small seminars - maybe to develop his own ideas and thoughts. Sometimes there were only a few students attending his lectures as he meditated on understanding the complexities – and wonders – of human communication. Out of this came, however, a set of core ideas that continue to have a major impact on students and colleagues from across both generations and societies. These ideas have inspired students and researchers to engage in philosophical discourse of Wittgensteinian ideas on the context dependence of word meaning and their implications for human communication and vocabulary development; they have also provided foundations for dealing with some very practical issues such as legal discourse, dialogues between teacher and child, prosecutor and suspect, and doctor and patient.

In what follows, we divide Rommetveit’s scholarly trajectory into four phases, each with an associated set of major publications.

Phase 1. General social psychology (1950s): Social Norms and Roles (1953/1955): This period started in the early fifties with Rommetveit’s 1953 PhD thesis, and extended into his early years as a professor of psychology at the University of Oslo. His PhD thesis in social psychology, Social Norms and Roles. Explorations in the Psychology of Enduring Social Pressure, was strongly influenced by Mead’s symbolic interactionism and by Fritz Heider’s work on attribution theory.

In these early years the Institute for Social Research in Oslo became an inspiring intellectual setting for Rommetveit. The Institute invited a number of American scholars as guest professors, and Rommetveit had the opportunity to work with several of them on issues of social psychology. Also, Rommetveit spent the 1956–57 academic year at the University of Minnesota, where many of these relationships were deepened. The young and progressive internationally oriented Institute in Oslo played an important role in the development of modern social science in Norway. Many young scholars who were destined to go on to establish their various disciplines gathered at the Institute for Social Research in the beginning of the 1950s. This context encouraged Rommetveit’s interdisciplinary attitude which was to accompany him all through his life.

Rommetveit played an important role in developing social psychology both in Norway and in Europe (Blakar, 2017). He introduced international – at that time primarily American – social psychology to Norway. At the same time he made a pioneering contribution to the development of European social psychology. Among other things, he was one of the founding fathers of European Association of Social Psychology, established in 1965.

Phase 2. Language-related psycholinguistic research (1960–1970s): Words, Meanings and Messages (1968), Språk, tanke og kommunikasjon (Language, Thought, and Communication) (1972c); Studies of Language, Thought and Verbal Communication (1979) (the last publication edited in collaboration with Rolv Blakar).

While not leaving his general social psychological and interdisciplinary foundations behind, during the 1960s, Rommetveit’s focus of interest shifted from general social psychology to language and communication. He himself provided important clues to this development in his thinking (Rommetveit, 1974). He dated his first involvement with questions of communication back to the late 1940s and his contact with Næss and his seminars on symbolic logic. His empirical studies of social psychology furthermore seemed to “… converge in intriguing problems concerning interrelationships between language, action and thought” (Rommetveit, 1974, p. 1). It is worth noting that from the very beginning his conceptualization of language had communication at its center, and communication as the encounter of at least two persons is inherently social. Thus, language in use became his study object.

At research seminars in psycholinguistics in 1963 and 1964 attended by one of the authors of this obituary, Astri Heen Wold, Rommetveit presented what was probably his first theoretical manuscript on language. It was entitled “In search of lost components of meaning in psychological studies of language. A critique of current trends in American psycholinguistic research and some eclectic inquiries into representational, emotive and associative psycholinguistic processes” (Rommetveit, n.d.). The manuscript clearly showed a dissatisfaction for the treatment of “meaning” in much of American psycholinguistic research and presented an outline of “word meaning” combining representational, associative and emotive components. In this conceptualization of word meaning traces of the ideas of Noble (the associative component) and Osgood (the emotive component) are clearly evident. The impact of Osgood, was a rarity in psycholinguistic research at the time. The manuscript is undated and was never published, but part of its content was later included in his first published book on language, Words, Meanings and Messages: Theory and Experiments in Psycholinguistics (1968).

Prior to the publication of this book Rommetveit had spent the academic year 1965–1966 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He describes this stay as most stimulating and offering numerous opportunities for discussions and explorations into psycholinguistic theory and research. During this stay Rommetveit also found an intellectual ally and friend in the Dutch linguist Eugenius M. Uhlenbeck who, like himself, was critical of American transformational-generative grammar and an advocate of the importance of studying language as a social phenomenon (Rommetveit, 1968, Preface).

Rommetveit’s ideas about language and communication were further developed by the decisive influence of the work of Wittgenstein (1968), in particular his basic assumption that words should be studied in “the stream of life”. In numerous ways Rommetveit applied and expanded this idea, for example in relation to “word meaning” for which Rommetveit coined the term “meaning potential”: a word’s meaning in isolation is “only” a meaning potential; the word’s precise meaning is to a large extent defined by its context of use (Rommetveit, 1972a).

Like Uhlenbeck, Rommetveit aimed at bringing together ideas and data from different paradigms into one coherent picture. This search for integration was in his own words “flavoured by a characteristically European preoccupation with communication, context and subtle semantic issues” (Rommetveit, 1974, p. 2). He readily recognized the difficulties inherent in this project and even characterized it on occasion as “utopian” (Rommetveit, 1974, pp. 3–4; Rommetveit, 2008, p. 2). As an integrator Rommetveit was brilliant, a champion of sophisticated interdisciplinary studies. At the same time he did not lose sight of “real life communication,” which was the source of much of his inspiration.

From the beginning of the 1960s and well into the 1970s, Rommetveit was engaged in empirical work on language, thought and communication. Findings from these studies – originally published in a broad array of journals – are presented in Rommetveit and Blakar (1979).

Phase 3. Critique of formal linguistics (1970–1980s): “Deep structure of sentences versus message structure. Some critical remarks on current paradigms, and suggestions for an alternative approach” (Rommetveit, 1972 b), On Message Structure (1974).

The research and writings of Rommetveit during the previous two decades resulted in a focus on language as a means of communication and a full-fledged critique of Chomsky-inspired linguistic and psycholinguistic research. The seeds of this critique had already surfaced in Rommetveit’s early unpublished work, but they became more pronounced in later publications where they appeared as a strong critique of the prevailing Harvard-MIT theoretical position, most prominently Chomsky’s generativist paradigm. In Rommetveit’s effort to study “subtle relationships between communication settings, tacit presuppositions and what is said” (1974, p.3, italics in original), he opposed the generativist idea that sentences may meaningfully be studied in vacuo. When examining theoretical commitments in their writings, Rommetveit disclosed, furthermore, a picture theory of language in which language simply depicts outer states of affairs, and a main question is then whether utterances do so in a “true” or “false” manner. In order to test truth values, utterances are decomposed into propositions that may be tested against outer states of affairs. They are true if they correspond with the facts, false if they do not, and this conclusion remains invariant across contexts.

In contrast to these assumptions that underpin Chomsky’s generativist paradigm, Rommetveit emphasized that the world can be brought into language from different perspectives, making truth values dependent on the perspectives being entertained and that the meanings of words in isolation are open and should be conceptualized as meaning potentials until they are used (see episodes on “Mr. Smith”, e.g. 1998, p. 227). Being dissatisfied with formal theories that took language outside the highly contextualized nature of human communication Rommetveit presented a dialogical approach as an alternative to the more mainstream monological one.

A general critique of formal linguistics may also be recognized in discussions of the written language bias in linguistics. Per Linell (2005) argued – after discussions with Rommetveit – that the dominance of formal theories in linguistics was related to the fact that they were formulated to explain written language and therefore applied most appropriately to this modality. A main problem was that the same theories were used as foundation for understanding spoken language which is basically dialogical.

Due to challenges in achieving open scientific discussions with crucial segments of the international research community, but maybe also due to a joy of writing in his mother tongue and in ways that brought his message beyond the realm of an academic elite, Rommetveit wrote his first comprehensive book on his theoretical alternative in “nynorsk” (New Norwegian), which is an official written standard of the Norwegian language. This standard is used by a minority of only approximately 7% of the Norwegian population including the people living on the island, Stord, where Rommetveit was born. The book was published in 1972, entitled Språk, tanke og kommunikasjon. Ei innføring i språkpsykologi og psykolingvistikk (Language,Thought and Communication. An introduction.) (Rommetveit, 1972c). This book, dedicated to Ludwig Wittgenstein, became a great success and has for decades influenced among others, students of psychology, sociology, education, law, and medicine.

Phase 4. Dialogism (1980–2010): “Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communication” (1992). Språk, individuell psyke, og kulturelt kollektiv (2008).

The main inspirations for this phase of Rommetveit’s work came from Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev S. Vygotsky, and a group of colleagues who met over several years at Bad Homburg (see below). In 1980, Rommetveit and Karsten Hundeide, colleague and professor at The University of Oslo, attended the first international conference on the ideas of Vygotsky in Chicago. Rommetveit (1985) contributed a chapter in the conference volume on issues of intersubjectivity in adult-child interaction. Here and in other works one can see that Rommetveit was by no means a passive borrower of ideas from Vygotsky or Bakhtin (for example, Wertsch, 2003). Many of the ideas he developed in the light of reading their work had already surfaced in his writings years earlier, but he also displayed an openness to incorporating new perspectives on the influence of other thinkers.

The hybridization that emerged out of this effort gained further traction between 1987 and 1993 when Rommetveit participated in an international and interdisciplinary group, the Bad-Homburg Group, that was supported by the Werner-Reimer-Stiftung in Germany and aimed at coordinating contributions by a wide array of members in an integrated social scientific and humanistic understanding of language, thought, and communication (Markova & Foppa, 1990, 1991).

In this phase of his intellectual career, Rommetveit developed new theoretical insights by harnessing concrete illustrations from everyday communication. He also applied some of his insights in studies of adult-child interaction, including studies in which he collaborated with his wife Sigrid Rommetveit, a dedicated speech and language pathologist working within the field of special needs education (Rommetveit, 1985; Rommetveit, & Rommetveit, 1981). Rommetveit’s dialogical perspective has had a great impact on many practicing speech therapists; he was a favorite teacher at courses and conferences training speech and language pathologists. Rather than seeing speech and language problems as solely individually owned, their clinical focus was moved toward their patients’ dialogical challenges via Rommetveit’s theoretical universe.

In addition, Rommetveit’s conceptualization of a word’s meaning as a meaning potential consisting of conventionalized, idiosyncratic and emotive components that achieve meaning by its context of use, impacted their understanding as well as their practice; examples are word meaning development and assessment of word definition skills (Hagtvet, 1992). During this period Rommetveit also fostered great intellectual synergy with Russian scholars, something that led him to say of Bakhtin that “I encountered a mind with whom I could really have a dialogue, who spoke my language so to say”. At the same time Rommetveit was increasingly interested in how ideas about dialogism and intersubjectivity could be applied to problems of pedagogy and special education where the dialogue by nature is asymmetric and intersubjectivity has to be built partly through the teacher’s increased ability to decenter (Engevik, Hølland, & Hagtvet, 2015; Karlsen, Røe-Indregård, Wold, Lykkenborg, & Hagtvet, 2018). Regarding Vygotskyan perspectives influence flowed in both directions so to speak in that Western research in the 1980s on Vygotsky’s idea of “the zone of proximal development” in child development was enriched by Rommetveit’s insight into the temporary, partially shared states of intersubjectivity (cf. Wertsch, 1984).

A life of wondering well lived

Our brief review of Rommetveit’s work paints a picture of extraordinary intellectual contributions, but the full impact of his life cannot be appreciated without taking into account the meditative stance and sense of wonder that he shared with all those he became familiar with. This came through in his countless presentations and is evident in his writings, and on all occasions it was accompanied by a great sense of generosity in the way he treated others and others’ ideas. Always reluctant to claim ideas as his own or to create some kind of Rommetveit School of thought, he was quick to point to the debt he had to others, even to the point of attributing insights to them that were clearly his own. He was thoughtful in this regard in his presentations, but it came through in particular in an ability to listen deeply to others and find something in what they said that they themselves had not understood.

And lest the picture we have painted be overly serious, it is worth noting that Ragnar was always capable of seeing the lighter side of human life. His many self-deprecatory remarks provided a reminder that he was not above finding humor in his own experiences and foibles. He loved to recount, for example, his encounter as a simple Norwegian who had just arrived in the States with the sophisticated and aggressive colleagues from New York whom he encountered among American psychologists in the 1960s at Minnesota. These colleagues took an obvious liking to him and decided that they would protect him from some of the unsavory aspects of American life like encounters with used car salesmen.

In the end, however, the biggest sense of wonder that Ragnar expressed and some of the most humorous episodes he conveyed came from the farmers and fishermen of his island, Stord. Regardless of how worldly and sophisticated he had become through world travel and intellectual encounters with symbolic logic and the thinking of Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Schutz, Husserl, and others, he felt that he remained grounded in his sense of wonder and in his humor through his friends in the beautiful setting in western Norway. They were the ones who asked him again and again what it was that he had learned on all those travels, and he had to laugh at himself a bit when he realized how much he struggled to give them a good answer.