The Meaning of Meaning

    Like Bruce, I definitely see Richards as bridging the gap between the Ancients and more contemporary rhetoricians, particularly Burke and Foucault. Richards places meaning as a part of both communication and language, on the academic agenda. However, like others have noted, his emphasis is not on grammar or correct usage, but rather a contextual theory of meaning and language, and rhetoric as the study of misunderstandings (as a result of the ambiguities of language) and how those of us who “do” language might be able to remedy them.

     There are two salient points in Richards that I’d like to address and work through here. The first is that he draws on cognitive psychological theories to help illuminate the ways in which the meaning of words, sentences, and even morphemes are colored by our previous experiences. He asks, “do we ever respond to a stimulus in a way which is not influenced by the other things that happened to us when more or less similar stimuli struck us in the past?” For example, if one is bitten by a dog in their childhood, the word dog, in addition to conjuring up visions of a four-legged, furry creature, will also connote emotions of fear and uncertainty. For rhetoric, I think this is why Richards pushes for an epistemology that is rooted in both symbols and definitions. This is wildly different from Aristotle’s heuristic/prescriptive (shout out to Josh for this observation) approach to rhetorical-situations-as-opportunities-for-persuasion. The next logical step in this understanding of rhetoric is to look at the roles language plays in the construction of knowledge and truth, which is exactly what Burke and Foucault will seek to accomplish in the coming weeks.

     Secondly, Joe notes that the major difference between Richards and his predecessors is an attention to overall processes of meaning-making instead of an attention to the persuasion of certain kinds of audiences in certain situations. I think the major point of departure between Richards and the Ancients (or maybe it’s a theoretical line of flight?) concerns the nature of truth/Truth. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to put words in Richards’ mouth and suggest that he doesn’t believe in the concept of an Absolute Truth, I will return to the bridge metaphor that Bruce invoked in his post. For Richards’ theory of rhetoric, even if there is capital-T truth, one could not be brought to it through language, as in Plato’s framework, because of the ambiguity of language and the contextual nature of meaning. That is the exigence of this work: to develop a theory of language and of rhetoric that will help overcome the trickiness of symbols (and that we define symbols with other symbols). On the bridge between the Ancients and the postmodernists, this is one step away from the conclusion the more contemporary rhetoricians draw: the only Truth is that language plays a role in how we conceive of Truth; everything else is socially situated, historically contextual, and agreed upon in certain communities, which in turn, strengthens the boundaries of those communities.