Background
Skjervheim, Hans was born in 1928.
Skjervheim, Hans was born in 1928.
Studied in Oslo, Norway and Germany.
1969, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bergen 1974-1975: Professor of Philosophy, Roskilde University Centre, Denmark. From 1975, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bergen.
Skjervheim contrasted objectivism to subjectvism, whose central notion is intentionalitySubjectivism holds that the categories of meaning and intentionality are presupposed by the humanistic sciences in a way which sets them apart from the natural sciences, and that the humanistic disciplines must make use of methods of understanding and interpretation in a way which distinguishes them from natural sciences. According to subjectivism, meaning or intentionality is a fundamental category that cannot be reduced to anything else. Skjervheim quotes Jaspers’s remark that intentionality is an ‘Urphänomen’. Skjervheim claimed, in accord with Dilthey, Weber and others, that meaning is given in experience meanings must belong to the given. Since meaning is fundamental and given, there is, according to subjectivism, no need for a theory of meaning. Rather, meanings belong to the epistemological basis for any empirical theory. Objectivism, on the other hand, as applied to man and society, is faced with the task of accounting for intcntionality, meaning and communication on a naturalistic basis: a theory of meaning on a physicalistic basis must be provided. Meaning must be reduced to, or explained in, physicalistic terms for things, relationships and processes in the physical world. Objectivists, such as Naess in Erkenntnis, have usually sought such an account in terms of behaviour, taking behaviour to be describable in physicalistic terms. But Skjervheim objects that a theory of meaning in terms of behaviour will not involve a reduction of meaning to physical phenomena and processes. Behaviour is in itself meaningful; there is no neutral description of behaviour independent of understanding and interpretation, taking the agent’s intention into account. Skjervheim concludes that the sciences of man must always take account of the intentions of the agents. In the interpretation of behaviour, the observer and the observed must share a common frame of understanding and meaning. Here, he is in accord with the Verstehen-tradition. In his view, the task of the sciences of man is understanding, not prediction and control. But the social scientist, like any scientist, contributes to reshaping our behavioural environment. He does this not by treating fellow humans as objects, or considering society as a fact from the outside, but by ‘participating in that great dialogue among men which results in reshaping.. the "world" in which we live’. But this ‘is to participate in defining reality, or defining that which we ought to accept’. A later work in the same vein is Participant and Spectator (1978). Skjervheim has been strongly influenced by the German hermeneutic tradition, phenomenology and existentialism. He stands as a mediator of these continental traditions to a postwar Norwegian intellectual milieu that had been strongly influenced by Naess’s early views, analytic philosophy and American pragmatism and social science. He has had a considerable influence on younger philosophers in Norway.