Although I see certain similarities between I. A. Richards and those who came before him, I found him to be, for the most part, markedly different. In my estimation, his resemblances to the ancients and others who came directly before him are only superficial, even if, on the surface, this does not appear to be so. However, before I deal with these paradoxes, I think it is important to address what I. A. Richards established that differentiated him from those who came before him since I believe these theories in many ways negate the possible similarities between him and the ancients.
Context was crucial for I. A. Richards; while other rhetoricians have discussed it before him, Richards contribution is vital since he deemed language to be completely contingent on context. For Richards, "Words, as every one now knows, 'mean' nothing by themselves, although the belief that they did, as we shall see in the next chapter, was once equally universal. It is only when a thinker makes use of them that they stand for anything, or, in one sense, have 'meaning'" (1274). Richards was moving against traditional linguistic theory that had deemed the signified (the mental representation of a sign) to be universal. For Richards, this was impossible, as the meaning ascribed to words in his philosophies was forever changing, completely contingent on the context (albeit it seems more the immediate context in Richards eyes, but I digress). Hence, Richards rejected the notion that ambiguity was "...a fault in language..." that could be eliminated and instead contended that "...it is an inevitable consequence of the powers of language..." (1287).
However, returning to my previous digression, I get a sense that in some ways Richards viewed that meaning resided in the immediate context. I tread lightly here as my understanding may be incomplete--"If so the fault will not lie, I hope and believe, either in my stupidity or in our joint stupidity. It will lie in the abstractness of the language" (1282). While I do not believe Richards thought we could arrive at a finite meaning from the immediate context, I did get the impression that he thought that meaning could, in some ways, be systematically studied within relation to the immediate context. He concedes that, "This theorem alleges that meanings, from the very beginning, have a primordial generality and abstractness..." (1283). Yet, he also begins his lecture by noting "...that there is room for a persistent, systematic, detailed inquiry into how words work..." which needed to be "philosophic" (1281).
This is why, in my estimation, Richards appears to "bridge the gap" between the ancients and some his contemporaries and postmodernity--he identifies the ambiguity of language that is critical to postmodern theories yet still appears to hold a belief that it can be systematically studied, even if such a study is by nature philosophic and incomplete. But, his discussions of sensation and perception seem to contradict this in a way:
"A sensation would be something that just was so, on its own, a datum; as such we have none. Instead we have perceptions, response whose character comes from the past as well as the present occasion. A perception is never just of an it; perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort. All thinking from the lowest to the highest--whatever else it may be--is sorting." (1283)
Here is where I really wrestled with Richards ideas. If all thinking is sorting based off of our perceptions, the immediate context that words are reliant on for meaning would appear to shift from individual to individual, unless we assume a universal human perception or that everyone sorts in similar ways. Not being willing to make these assumptions, yet agreeing with Richards overall premise, I would have to contend that the immediate context is not as crucial as Richards believes; even within the immediate context, varying perceptions and lines of thought among individuals would seem to necessitate that words would "mean" in different ways for different individuals. Thus, meaning is even further ambiguous as it is reliant on the individual. But, as a necessary caveat, I must note that I'm not sure whether Richards may have arrived at this conclusion or not. I sensed an oscillation in these texts.
Thus, I conclude with an open-ended question to my classmates: Is Richards closer on a theoretical continuum to the ancients and his contemporaries or does his thinking more or less reflect (and perhaps possibly inspired) the postmodern thinkers that came after him?
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