Language at work

Brittney, David, Joe, and Nora

To begin, Richards and Weaver acknowledge that rhetoric had become a “discredited subject” (a casualty of the debate between science and humanities).  To this end, they attempt to re-establish rhetoric as a valued subject of inquiry by discussing the departmentalization of Rhetoric, but in their own respective ways.

They first take different approaches to the treatment of Rhetoric. Richards approaches rhetoric like a cognitive psychologist: he views behaviorism (observing patterns of external behavior) as obsolete because of the movement’s reluctance to theorize about the mental activity of people--behaviorists aren’t studying mental representation which Richards raves about. He then calls for a new type of behaviorism that observes behaviors to make assumptions about the mental activity: “We should develop our theory of signs from observations of other people”--in other words, observing physical behavior to understand mental activity.  Richards finds Rhetoric’s place closely attached to social sciences.

Weaver, on the other hand, is critical of this scientific approach: according to Weaver, the essence of humanity is to be emotional.  He first discusses the values of thinking in terms of science as attempting to make humanity into “logic machines,” but he claims that this is impossible. “[H]umanity includes emotionality, or the capacity to feel and suffer, to know pleasure, and it includes the capacity for aesthetic satisfaction, and, what can be only suggested, a yearning to be in relation with something infinite,” (1352). Weaver is advocating for a shift in values in rhetoric (and the humanities): we should be focusing on how emotionality is an important part about being human--put specifically, Weaver mentions how emotions guide how we make meaning (1358). He’s asking us to reconsider how emotions and science interact with each other.

While they disagree on the treatment of Rhetoric in terms of science, they both discuss language’s special link to Rhetoric--again, in different ways.  Weaver seems more concerned with placing rhetoric on a large canvas of expressing and advocating for values while Richards’ idea of rhetoric has more to do with analysis of how language functions within a discourse.  In other words, Richards wants to talk about nuts and bolts of language and meaning--Weaver focuses on how language is motivated.  Weaver says, “Men are such that they are born into history, with an endowment of passion and a sense of the ought. … his life is therefore characterized by movement towards goals.”  Rhetoric, then, is how we reach those goals through language: that “rhetoric is cognate with language” (1359).  He argues, invoking Burke, that all rhetoric is motivated.   Language and values are interwoven: “Language is a system of imputation, by which values and precepts are first framed in the mind and are imputed onto things” (1359). This leads into the argument that all language is sermonic: people use language to advocate for others to view the world “in our way” (1360)--how we construct the world in our minds.  Richards, meanwhile, wants to revive rhetoric as “a study of verbal understanding and misunderstanding” (1280) and in order to do that, he wants to examine how one makes meaning (nuts and bolts). Language, then, has a function and power in context. For Weaver, the context has more to do with decisions for making appeals, or making rhetoric.  Richards is more focused on interpretation.

In terms of language’s link to values, what is most obvious in terms of influence is Weaver’s unabashedly Platonic ideals. Richards, however, is not obviously so: He claims that hermeneutics is always educated guesswork (“Inference and guesswork! What else is interpretation?”), which hints at the idea that we are not striking at a concrete, external reality that is potentially cogent to everyone (1290). And to be fair, perhaps Weaver would not go this far either. However, Weaver repeatedly refers to realities that transcend contexts. Due to Plato’s influence on Weaver, it comes to no surprise that Weaver argues that ethics and the human qualities of man make for a complete rhetoric. Similar  to Plato, Weaver values the virtuous man. Richards, on the other hand, challenges what such virtue has to do with usage. He claims that “right” or “good” use is a result of the successful means of using language. Weaver would say good use has a chief concern with one’s ethics.

In addition, they both reference Basic English. Richards creates a condensed version of the English language (850 words) as a solution for ESL students; Weaver criticizes the idea, likening it to the “nonlover” in Plato’s Phaedrus: “semantically purified speech” (1363). For Weaver, while the words are “highly available,” they also impoverish language, robbing it of its potential range and impact.

Further in discussing language, both discuss language as systems of signs, symbols, and metaphors.  For Weaver, everything is metaphorical, because everything stands for some deeper reality. In “Language is Sermonic,” he writes “I have a consistent impression that the broad resource of analogy, metaphor, and figuration is favored by those of a poetic and imaginative cast of mind. We make use of analogy or comparison when the available knowledge of the subject permits only probable proof” (1355). But a paragraph later, he almost apologetically suggests that “the cosmos is one vast system of analogy” (emphasis his)--we compare the ineffable to the commonplace by default (1356). Although Richards does not mention the term “metaphor” directly in either of the texts we read for class, he does discuss how a word’s meaning constitutes for “the missing parts of its contexts” and functions as “a substitution for them” (1287).  In this way, Richards implies that all language is, more or less, metaphorical by means of interpretation.

As a framework, they also both look to definitions. While Richards requests a “Theory of Definition” which would help to control meaning of symbols (1278),  Weaver says that definitions deal with “fundamental and unchanging properties” (1354).  For Weaver, definitions are one of his methods of interpreting a subject (1354).  We use them to capture essence.  Richards doesn’t really speak in terms of essences--he seems to view symbols as more complex than that.  Even further, while Richards does not believe that there is any natural relationship between symbols and their referents, Weaver disagrees (this is more evident in To Write the Truth).