Richards vs. the Ancients

Richards is concerned with meaning and what words and sentences mean.  The basis of his philosophy of rhetoric is that “Words, as everyone knows, ‘mean’ nothing by themselves…It is only when a thinker makes use of them that they stand for anything, or, in one sense, have ‘meaning.’  They are instruments” (1274).  One must know the context of discourse, which includes the audience’s experience and the words written or spoken, because there is only an indirect relationship between the word and the object it stands for.  Communication is interpreted based on context  - and to know what a word means, the listener must hear the words around that word and draw on his or her experience.

Richards has a very different view of rhetoric than the ancients.  For Plato, rhetoric plants seeds of virtue, leading the listener to transcendent Truth.  Richards doesn’t discuss transcendent Truth.  He argues that words by themselves mean nothing, can be used to deceive, and can cause unintended misunderstandings.  If Richard’s rhetoric plants any seeds, they are seeds of ambiguity, not Truth.  In Richard’s view of rhetoric, ambiguity is unavoidable because language is a context-dependent medium.

Aristotle believes that argument relies on logic, how the audience feels about the topic, and how the audience feels about the speaker.  The most important part of argument is logic because there is an external truth.  He doesn’t discuss context, which Richard focuses on.  Richards calls the idea that truth can be communicated in language a fallacy.  He refers to the “One and Only One True Meaning Superstition” (1286).  Discourse doesn’t have one “true” meaning.  Meaning depends on context – the words used affect the meaning of other word, and the audience’s experience determine how they interpret communication.  But Richards does seem to refer to ethos and pathos when he says “It holds for the feeling if any towards what I am talking about, for the relation towards my audience I want to establish or maintain with the remark, and for the confidence I have in the soundness of the remark” (1289).

Ramus and Astell both saw rhetoric as an art, but Richards is concerned with ambiguity, not art.  Building on Ramus’s assertion that rhetoric is about anything, Richards looks at different kinds of discourse from poetry to scientific writing.  Ramus, like Richards, acknowledges that words can be used to deceive.  Astell believes that good rhetoric concerns divine truth, a truth that Richards does not believe can be communicated through language if it exists at all.

One thing our reading has got me thinking about is the difference between truth (or perhaps Truth) and knowledge.  While Plato is all about Truth, which is transcendent and eternal, Aristotle seems more interested in knowledge, in what can be proven through evidence and argument.  Richards knows that arguments must be made through language, and language is an ambiguous medium.  This distinction between truth and knowledge reminded me of the part of the film A Few Good Men when Tom Cruise’s character, a Navy lawyer, parses the distinction between whether he thinks his client was in the right when he followed an order to haze a fellow Marine and what he can prove in court.  I looked for a clip on YouTube, but couldn’t find this particular scene.  The line I’m thinking of goes something like “It doesn’t matter what I believe.  It only matters what I can prove!  So don’t tell me what I know, or don’t know, I know the law!”  He’s being asked about truth, or at least what he believes is the truth, but he knows in court what matters is what he can prove as knowledge.  This is a distinction that I see in Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric.   Richards believes language is slippery and would not be surprised at legalese in the courtroom.

To answer Bruce’s question, I think Richards is closer to Aristotle than Plato, and Richards is much closer to the postmoderns than the ancients.