Richards’s New Rhetoric

     Influenced by Peirce and Saussure, I. A. Richards pays close attention to language and signs. His theory centers on meaning: how meaning is generated; how to avoid misunderstanding. Specifically speaking, according to the excerpts we read, Richards is concerned with the way words work, the role words play in communication (especially interpretation). Considering words in discourses and contexts, he defines and develops rhetoric in a new way.

     In Richards’s view, rhetoric is the “study of verbal understanding and misunderstanding” (1281), which indicates an emphasis on language and communication. Though he admits the merit of the old Rhetoric (a tradition related to persuasion), he also believes that “what it has most to teach us is the narrowing and blinding influence of that preoccupation, that debaters’ interest” (1281). Persuasion is only one aim of discourse while Richards attempts to discover some general rules through analyzing signs and words. This is what makes Richards radically different from the ancients. Though seeing persuasion’s role differently, both Plato and Aristotle connect rhetoric with persuasion. Emphasizing absolute, transcendent knowledge, Plato’s ideal of rhetoric is to “produce conviction in the soul” (163). Aristotle regards rhetoric as “the modes of persuasion” (179) and examines various ways of persuasion systematically, valuing logic and enthymemes. On the other hand, Richards is also different from Ramus and Astell in that Ramus reduces rhetoric to style and delivery and Astell does something similar (she pays more attention to style) though her rhetoric is for women, influenced by Christianity, while Richards’s rhetoric concentrates on meaning and language. Interested in the problem of knowing, he creates a triangle of symbol, thought (reference), and thing (referent). The imputed relation between symbol and referent reveals words as a limited means of communication (or a way of misdirection). Connecting sign-situations with all perception, Richards’s theory of signs offers a new method of studying the process of interpretation and how knowledge and meaning are generated. Furthermore, Richards believes that meanings “have a primordial generality and abstractness” (1283) and work as “delegated efficacy” (1284), “the missing parts of the context” (1285). Meaning comes from “the interinanimation between words” (1290) and their contexts —
he also redefines contexts, which include not only traditional ones but also “a recurrent group of events” (1288). Here lies in the third difference between Richard’s rhetoric and the Old Rhetoric. Recognizing different types of context (the literary context and “the technical sense of context”), Richards opposes “the One and Only One True Meaning Superstition” (1286) and supports “multiplicity of meaning” (1286), which makes him view ambiguity differently: “where the old Rhetoric treated ambiguity as a fault in language…the new Rhetoric sees it as an inevitable consequence of the powers of language and as the indispensable means of most of our most important utterances” (1287). While Aristotle mentions clearness (“Words of ambiguous meaning are chiefly useful to enable the sophist to mislead his hearers” (238)) and Astell stresses clarity (846), Richards discovers the value of ambiguity.

     In certain aspects, Richards is similar to his predecessors. Like Ramus, who believes that his general theory including ten topics can cover everything (690), Richards is looking for general rules about language and meaning. For example, when talking about the word as the missing part of its contexts, he feels that “The same general theorem covers all the modes of meaning” (1287). Moreover, against Quintilian’s statement that “the orator cannot be perfect unless he is a good man” (683), Ramus asserts that rhetoric has nothing to do with virtues (684), different from Plato who distinguishes the theory of good speaking and writing from the theory of bad speaking and writing (156) as well as Astell who emphasizes “the way to be good Orators is to be good Christians” (855). In this sense, Richards is like Ramus. His theory of signs and meaning is a new technique, not related to morals. Also, when Richards talks about emotive meaning (for example, when insulting or flattering) (1287) and other functions of language including feeling, the relation towards an audience, and a speaker/writer’s confidence (1289), it is not hard to see the possible connection between these concepts and Aristotle’s pathos and ethos. Actually Richards mentions Aristotle several times when analyzing language in his texts. For instance, he agrees with Aristotle that there is “no natural connection between the sound of any language and the things signified” (1293).