I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: Richards and the New Rhetoric

I.A. Richards defines rhetoric as "the study of misunderstanding and its remedies" (1270), and describes it as a "discredited subject" (1281). His definition of rhetoric, which focuses on individual words in context and the slippery nature of language and meaning, is a far cry from that of the ancients. This is emphasized in his discussion of people's tendency to assume "that the speaker is referring to what we should be referring to were we speaking the words ourselves" (1276). In adjusting his unit of study down to the level of individual words, Richards gets at something very different than Aristotle's enthymemes and examples. 

Plato, for instance, focuses on absolute truth and the orator's ability to lead the audience through language to some transcendent truth. For Richards, however, there exists a wide and complicated path from reference (thought) to referent (thing), and for each hearer or reader, the context for individual words within a sentence, and sentences within texts is completely different and based on a series winding and forking previous experiences. Richards writes that "Language if it is to be used must be a ready instrument" (1275), and goes on to discuss the misleading nature of shorthand terms like "meaning" to demonstrate that even those relations that seem simple are really quite complex and varied by individual. He even goes so far as to say that our tendency to assume "that the speaker is referring to what we should be referring to were we speaking the words ourselves" (1276). This is a tricky concept for me (and one I totally agree with), and it certainly is not as reassuring as Plato's idea of the rhetor handing down eternal wisdom. 

Richards also jabs at the Greeks, who he says, "were in many ways not far from the attitude of primitive man towards words" (1278). In contrast to Plato's discussion of oral language being superior to the written word, Richards writes that "The written form gives words far more independence than they possess as units of sound in speech" (1289). His discussion of signs and symbols and their discovery in "that special and deceptive case" (1279) of our own introspection seems related in some way to Plato's Delphic quest to understand his true nature, and when Richards points out that "we are generally better judges of what other people are doing than of what we are doing ourselves" (1279), he seems to be getting at the same fundamental questions of existence as Plato. The difference is that Richards doesn't seem to believe that the answers are out there; instead perception and context are key. 

Richards describes the old Rhetoric as an "offspring of dispute" which was the "theory of the battle of words and has always been itself dominated by the combative impulse" (1281). But, he diverges from the ancients (and, I think, specifically Aristotle) in that he points out that persuasion is "only one among the aims of discourse" (1281). So, while both Plato and Aristotle focused on persuasion, Richards expands his definition to include other purposes like understanding and exposition. And I tend to think that Aristotle's process of examining various types of people (old and young men, for instance) wouldn't hold up well against Richards's assertion that each individual brings a specific and endlessly complicated perception to each context. "It is important," he writes, "... to realize how far back into the past all our meanings go, how they grow out of one another much as an organism grows, and how inseparable they are from one another" (1283).