The Meaning of Meaning
of
I. A. Richards
(From the Third Edition of A First Look at Communication Theory by Em Griffin, (1991) 8th.ed. 2014, McGraw-Hill, Inc. This text-only version of the article appears on the World Wide Web site www.afirstlook.com. The text version does not contain any figures. A facsimile of the original article, which includes all figures, is also available in PDF format.)
When I teach my seminar on intimate communication, I always save the last thirty minutes of class for discussing ideas that aren’t covered in the reading assignment. Halfway through the semester a student named Brenda asked a personal question that sparked everyone’s interest: ‘‘When a guy says, ‘I love you,’ but wants me to ‘prove’ my affection physically, does he really love me?"
I was about to suggest to Brenda that a declaration of love paired with a demand that she ‘‘put out" physically sounded more like an expression of lust than one of love. But I caught myself and avoided the semantic trap that Cambridge University professor I. A. Richards labeled the ‘‘proper meaning superstition"—the mistaken belief that words have a precise definition. Instead, I responded to her question with one of my own: ‘‘What do you mean when you use the word love?"
If he were still alive, Richards might have smiled in approval at my response. For even though he was a poet, world-class mountain climber, literary critic, and the author of forty-nine books, Ivor Armstrong Richards was first and foremost a teacher. And the lesson he most wanted students to learn was that meanings don’t reside in words; they reside in people.
The New Rhetoric: A Study of How Words Work
Richards was a man born ahead of his time. When he was a young scholar in the early 1920s, communication education focused mainly on the study of rhetoricการพูดโน้มน้าว. And Richards made no secret of his disdaiไม่ชอบ for the art of oratoryศิลปะะการพูด. ‘‘So low has Rhetoric sunk that we would do better just to dismiss it to Limbo than to trouble ourselves with it."1 He was impatientใจร้อน with rhetoric’s exclusive focus on public persuasion, characterizing it as ‘‘sales-talk selling sales-talk."2 As for the historical study of classical rhetoric, he once said that he ‘‘didn’t think history ought to have happened" and therefore ‘‘didn’t see why we should study it."3
Richards proposed a new rhetoric that would be the ‘‘study of misunderstanding and its remedies."4 The old rhetoric had offered general rules for speakers who wanted to sway an audience. Richards thought it was more important to examine how much of a message we understand when we hear it. His new rhetoric focused on comprehension rather than persuasion.
Like Shannon and Weaver, who we looked at in Chapter 4, Richards believed that every conversation suffers from information loss. But instead of blaming channel noise for the leakage, Richards attributed the communication gap between source and destination to the nature of language itself. The goal of his new rhetoric was to put words under the microscope to see how they work. Since he regarded language as an extension of the human mind and sense organs, his study was rooted in the humanities rather than science.
Words As Symbols Interpreted In Context
As is common in the field of semantics, Richards began his inquiry into the meaning of meaning by making a distinction between signs and symbols. A sign is something we directly encounter, yet at the same time it refers to something else. Thunder is a sign of rain. A punch in the nose is a sign of anger. An arrow is a sign of whatever it points toward.
Words are also signs, but of a special kind. They are symbols. Unlike the examples cited above, most symbols have no natural connection with the things they describe. There’s nothing in the sound of the word kiss or anything visual in the letters h-u-g that signifies an embrace. One could just as easily coin the term snarf or clag to symbolize a close encounter of the romantic kind.
Because words are arbitrary symbols, they have no inherent meaning. Like chameleons that take on the coloration of their environment, words, according to Richards, take on the meaning of the context in which a person encounters them. This suggests that ‘‘most words, as they pass from context to context, change their meanings."5 Context is the key to meaning.
We have all had grammar teachers who drummed into us the importance of looking at context to understand an unfamiliar term. They convinced us that we can usually grasp the author’s meaning by looking at the surrounding words in a sentence. But Richards used the term context to refer to much more than adjacent phrases. He defined context as the ‘‘cluster of events that occur together." This means that context is not just a sentence, or even the situation in which the word is spoken. Context is the whole field of experience that can be connected with an event—including thoughts of similar events. Let’s examine Brenda’s thought process as she used the word love to see how this works.
Thinking As A Sorting Of Experiences
The immediate context of Brenda’s question was a seminar discussion about a test designed to measure love within families. In the course of this discussion, Brenda began to make connections between the filial love of parents and her romantic relationship with the guy who said he loved her. When Brenda asked about true love, I had just told the class that the scale’s creator defined virtue as ‘‘love which is directed toward furthering the welfare of another."6 Brenda obviously saw a contrast between this definition of love and her boyfriend’s if-you-love-me-prove-it demand.
Richards described thinking as the process of sorting experience into various categories:
A perception is never just an it; perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort. All thinking from the lowest to highest—whatever else it may be—is sorting.7
His use of the term sorting makes me think of arranging a deck of cards according to the four suits—spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts. It’s as if Brenda’s mind were a card table, and after shuffling all her life experiences she pulled out the memory cards of love for family and romantic passion because they both had red hearts on the corners.
Further discussion in class revealed that Brenda tapped additional contexts for her understanding of the word love. She pictured walking hand in hand on an empty beach, hugging a cuddly kitten, giving a blanket to a homeless man on the street, and watching her future husband change their yet-to-be-conceived baby’s diaper. Is all this what the word love really means? It was for Brenda. Her boyfriend might have sorted his cards differently. That’s why I. A. Richards insisted that no dictionary could define the meaning of a word. Meaning is personal. Words don’t mean things; people do.
The Semantic Triangle: Picturing The Problem
Together with his British colleague, C. K. Ogden, Richards created his semantic triangle to show the indirect relationship between symbols and their supposed referents. Figure 5.1 illustrates the iffy link between the word dog and the actual hound that may consume the majority of your groceries.
The top of the triangle shows some thoughts that you might have when observing the Hush Puppy pictured at the lower right. Once you perceive the actual animal, thoughts of warmth and faithful friendship fill your mind. Since there is a direct or causal relationship between the referent and the reference, Richards connected the two with a solid line.
Your thoughts are also directly linked with the dog symbol at the lower left of the triangle. Given the way you sort through your perceptions, using the word dog to symbolize your thoughts is almost a foregone conclusion. Richards diagrammed this causal relationship with a solid line as well.
But the connection between the word dog and the actual animal is tenuous at best. Richards represented it with a dotted line. Two people could use that identical word to stand for completely different beasts. When you say dog, you might mean a slow-moving, gentle pet who is very fond of children. When I use the word, I might mean a carnivorous canine who bites anyone—and is very fond of children. (Note the slippery use of the term fond in this example.) Unless we both understand that ambiguity is an inevitable condition of language, you and I are liable to carry on a conversation about dogs without ever realizing we aren’t talking about the same thing.
Lest you think the identification of a word with its referent is a trivial problem, consider references to acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Unfortunately, just the word AIDS has a chilling effect on many who hear it. Ponder the plight of the manufacturer of a dietetic candy called ‘‘Ayds." Because the name of the candy sounds like the medical condition, sales fell 50 percent and the manufacturer was forced to change the name of the product.
Richards believed that his semantic triangle applies to all words—the descriptive terms of science, the emotive terms of poetry, and the vast majority of words that fall somewhere in between. But he didn’t regard words as equal-opportunity puzzlers. He saw emotive language as the chief source of linguistic confusion. As Brenda and the rest of us in the intimacy seminar discovered, words like love can produce great misunderstanding. The greater the discrepancy in the life experiences of two people, the greater the probability that words meant to describe feelings and attitudes will create semantic chaos.
Linguistic Remedies For Misunderstanding
Late in his career, I. A. Richards borrowed Shannon and Weaver’s information theory model (see page 49) and altered it to show the necessity of common experience for the effective communication of meaning. Figure 5.2 shows his addition of comparison fields. The downward-pointing a