Richards: Contexts. Ancients. Postermodernity?

Richards and Ogden's work in The Meaning of Meaning provides a framework that allows us to understand how words come to have meaning through sorting individual perceptions in reference to our past experiences; these past experiences provide one “context” through which we interpret words and acknowledge them to have a particular meaning. A second context that guides our interpretation is a literal one, when we look at other words surrounding the one in question (like in a sentence) and inferring what a word means based on what surrounds it. Through the interplay of multiple contexts, we are able to discern the referent to which a symbol is referring. In outlining this theory, Richards is attempting to show the tenuous connection between words and their meanings and how our discourse shapes those meanings.

Before I get to comparing Richards to the ancients, I'd like to take up Bruce's contention that “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.” I think I see where you're going with this line of thought, Bruce, but I think there might be a false dichotomy in this sentiment. We are either assuming universal perception or total and complete individuality, i.e., every individual perceives in a different way, and I, too cannot accept either those assumptions. But I see Richards somewhere in the middle of this dichotomy. When we look at a broad context, like a single culture, some patterns of sorting can arise among members of a group based on their repeated, shared experiences – if I'm anticipating Burke somewhat correctly, this process is how terministic screens are formed. And while each individual has a terministic screen unique to them, they are still largely shaped by cultural experiences, ideology, hegemony, so on and so forth. So, in that regard, we can examine individual contexts when we take into account larger cultural contexts.

When it comes to Richards and the ancients, I saw some similarities with Aristotle and Plato, and a pretty foundational difference with Plato. Richards driving assumption that words do not inherently hold their meaning echoes the ideas of Aristotle, as noted in The Philosophy of Rhetoric: “It was Aristotle who said that there can be no natural connection between the sound of any language and the things signified...” (1293). While Aristotle makes a number of appeals to “the natural” in Rhetoric, making him somewhat of an innatist, he took into account the epistemic nature of discourse in the creation of meaning, one of Richards' key principles. Plato on the other hand differs from Richards because he not only made appeals to the “natural,” but his belief in capital T Truth also indicates that there is no fluidity of meaning in Platonic philosophy. I may be misreading Richards a little bit, since he holds all meaning to begin in abstraction, and that may ring with Plato's idea of getting to an abstract, absolute Truth; but Richards' emphasis on experience creating individual contexts seems a lot more empirical than Plato. Finally, what Richards seems to have in common with Plato and Aristotle both is their emphasis on systematic inquiry; in the ancients, we see dialectic being praised as the preferred means of study, a very detailed approach to finding any sort of truth. Richards' theorem also relies on the systematic inquiry of meaning in order to derive some broader principles about the nature of language and discourse.

I'll close with a response to Bruce's question: In the context of this course's readings, I'm not sure where we start to distinguish between modern and postmodern thinkers. But I was surprised at how much of Richards' ideas anticipate what was to come in rhetoric. His initial discussion of ambiguity made me think of Burke immediately, and y'all see that I tired to make a connection between Richards and Burke by bringing in terministic screens to better understand “context.” Also, I think Richards' emphasis on discourse in the creation of meaning and/or knowledge foreshadows postmodernity in attempting to question the guiding assumptions of how we conceive language. I'm going to try to depart from Jacob's claim that Richards' view has some sort of objectivity tied to it in there being a right and wrong way to interpret something. I don't think Richards is getting at an objective view because his Triangle model allows for so much fluidity; if anything, I think Richards would have the rhetor consider what symbols to employ depending on context and audience so that the audience properly takes the rhetor's meaning. I also got the sense that Lecture III, “The Interinanimation of Words” was attempting to pull the rug out from under the doctrine of Usage, implying that the doctrine had some objectivity to it that Richards did not agree with.