DO YOU KNOW ROMMETVEIT,RAGNAR - ON DIALOGUE AND SILENCE, POETRY AND PEDANTRY, AND CLEVERNESS AND WISDOM IN PSYCHOLOGY (AN INTERVIEW WITH ROMMETVEIT,RAGNAR)

Background Ragnar Rommetveit is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at th e University of Oslo, Norway. He received his PhD in 1954 at the Unive rsity of Oslo, became Associate Professor in the same year, and has co ntinued as Professor of Psychology since 1959. He developed a hermeneu tically based theory of communication as an alternative to representat ional-computational models of language and mind. In fact, he was the f ounder of the 'dialogical approach' in psychology-long before this not ion has become popular in the 1990s. He has been interested in communi cation, intersubjectivity and the construction of meaning in language use, and was one of the early critics of attempts to formalize the sem antic structure of language within the framework of Chomskian generati ve grammar. Ragnar Rommetveit was Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota (1956-7), at the University of Michigan (1961), and at C ornell University (1964-5). He was Fellow at the Center for Advanced S tudy in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, USA (1965-6) and the Nether lands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Scienc es, Wassenaar (1972-3). From 1977 until 1983 he held the title of Andr ew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. He was give n an honorary doctorate by the University of Linkoping, Sweden, in 198 2, and by the University of Bergen, Norway, in 1990.