(1893 - 1979)
Ivor Armstrong Richards was, originally, a student of literature. His work spanned a unique period, in that phenomenal technological changes took place in his lifetime.
Richards begins by examining Bacon's notion that language (the idols)serves as a barrier between us and reality. Richards, in Philosophy of Rhetoric, argues:
"Rhetoric, I shall argue, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies. We struggle all our days with misunderstandings and no apology is required for any study which can prevent or remove them."
To truly understand Richards, it is important to understand four aspects of his approach to rhetoric: the context theorem of meaning, the interanmination of words, the Proper Meaning Superstition, and the metaphor.
The Context Theorem of Meaning
The context theorem of meaning starts with Richards' theory of
abstraction (how words come to mean). Richards holds that we
constantly react to and interpret "things" around us.
Our reactions to and interpretations of those things depend on
past interaction with similar stimuli. Thus, our interpretation
of past perception give meaning to our current reaction and
interpretations. So, the meaning we attach to stimuli is rooted
in our past and the meaning evolves based on interrelationships
between interpretations. As Richards writes in Meaning of
Meaning:
Our interpretation of any sign is our psychological reaction to it as determined by our past experience in similar situations, and by our present experience. If this is stated with due care in terms of causal contexts or correlated groups we get an account of judgement, belief and interpretation which places the psychology of thinking on the same level as the other inductive sciences. . . . A theory of thinking which discards mystical relations between knower and the known and treats knowledge as a causal affair open to ordinary scientific investigation, is one which will appeal to common sense inquirers.
So we perceive incoming data, compare it with our past experiences, analyze, classify, and process them, and attach meaning as a result of the process. So all perceived events are automatically processed by the mind which continuously compares the present with the past. Therefore any meaning we attach to stimuli is rooted in our past. The key to this idea is Richard's argument of the importance of context, in that we live in the here-and-now only in our current perception's relationship to our past.
This argument must also then posit that we are the sum of our experiences. We see the world through a lens shaped by our individual historical contexts.
Richards also holds that words and symbols are unique
sensations. Richards argue that they are "substitutes,
exerting the powers of what is not there." OK, then the
obvious question becomes:
How do words, which refer to things, come to mean?
Remember, Richards does not deal with words which do not deal
with things, he calls this "emotive language." He was
seeking a scientific answer for the causal link between words and
things. The answer is simply thus:
". . . the meaning attached to words also depends on past encounters with the word and what it correspondingly stands for. The summation of past experience with a symbol together with the present instance of the word determine meaning." Golden, Berquist, & Coleman, The Rhetoric of Western Thought (177.)
So the immediate context the symbol is in plus all the past psychological contexts we have seen the symbol in previously allow it to mean. This abridging of past and present context is what Richards called technical context. Richards calls this process delegated efficacy: "that description applies above all to the meaning of words, whose virtue is to be substitutes exerting the powers of what is not there. They do this as other signs do it, though in more complex fashions, through their context."
The Proper Meaning Superstition
The Proper Meaning Superstition is the "common belief"
that a word has only one meaning, independent of context, and
controlling it's use and the purposes for which that word is
used.
Richards argues that it is obviously fallacious in that words hold only one meaning from a technical context. Additionally, since we all have individual sets of contexts we each operate from our personal contexts. Therefore, there can be no proper meaning of any word.
He argues that the use of no single word can be judged away from the contest it is used in. This is interanimation, the process by which words are given life, given meaning, by their grouping into larger contexts (sentences, paragraphs, essays, etc...) The words in a sentence are dependent upon one another to create the context from which we derive their meaning.
Semantic Triangle
Richards argues that meaning occurs due to an indirect
relationship between a word and the object it references (the
object is called a referent). Richards says the relationship is
indirect because the relationship is indirect because the symbol
is merely an abstraction of reality, not reality itself. Thus, we
use symbols to mean things, but Richards argues that there is a
third component, our thought or reference.
Imagine a triangle. (my draw program isn't working). At the lower left hand corner is the symbol, the word. At the right corner is the object/referent. At the top is the individual's context about the relationship between the two, which Richards terms the reference.
Metaphor
Richards argues that this entire process, in fact all of
language, is based in this process described by the semantic
triangle. He says that we constantly sort perception, comparing
them to contexts to create references. He holds that this process
is, by it's nature, metaphor. He argues that the
metaphor exists as a "borrowing between and intercourse of
thoughts, a transaction between contexts."
Richards then provides us a way to conceptualize the metaphor. Richards calls the symbol itself a vehicle. He uses the term tenor to mean the underlying idea to which the symbol refers. Thus the semantic triangle would have the vehicle in the lower left corner, referent in the lower right, and tenor would be the term describing the contexts used to ascertain meaning.
The key issue here is the relationship between tenor and vehicle. Study of this relationship can demonstrate how the meaning was formed individually, and can be applied to communal development of meanings.
Thus, for Richards, the entire world is Metaphor as we can only apply meaning to our perceptions through an application of our personal contexts. Our thought, then, would also be metaphor.
Perhaps Richards' greatest gift to criticism was to provide us with a model that allows us to understand how we think and how things come to mean.