This Day in Philosophy — 7 September: I. A. Richards and the problem of what a word does

I. A. Richards died on 7 September 1979, aged 86. He is filed under literary criticism, which has cost him readers in philosophy who would find him useful.

The Meaning of Meaning#

In 1923 Richards and C. K. Ogden published The Meaning of Meaning, subtitled A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism.

Its central device is the semantic triangle. Between a symbol (the word) and a referent (the thing) there is no direct line. The connection runs through a third point — the thought or reference in a mind — and the base of the triangle, from symbol to referent, is drawn as a broken line.

The point of the broken line is the whole argument. Words do not attach themselves to things. They attach to things by way of somebody's use of them, and different users bring different references to the same symbol.

From this Richards drew a working distinction that remains serviceable: language has an emotive function alongside a referential one. Much of the argument people have about words is not disagreement about facts but a collision of emotive uses mistaken for a factual dispute.

The book's practical target was the confusion this produces in ordinary argument, and its ambition was therapeutic — a diagnosis of how much philosophical and political disagreement is verbal machinery running without load. That ambition places it beside the work Wittgenstein and Austin would do from a different direction.

Practical Criticism: an experiment#

Richards's second contribution is one of the few genuine experiments in the humanities.

At Cambridge he distributed poems to his students with all identifying information removed — no author, no date, no title, no reputation. He asked them to write down what they made of the poem. Then he collected and analysed the responses.

Practical Criticism (1929) is the report. The findings were unflattering and, read today, still are.

Deprived of the signals that normally do the work — a famous name, a period, a received judgement — a large proportion of very well-educated readers misread the poem's plain sense. They mistook irony for sincerity, imported doctrines the text did not contain, and produced confident evaluations resting on nothing in front of them. Richards catalogued the failure types: stock responses, sentimentality, doctrinal adhesion, critical preconceptions.

The philosophical interest of this is not literary. It is an empirical result about testimony and authority: how much of what we take ourselves to have judged for ourselves is in fact carried by the reputation attached to the object.

That question is now urgent for a reason Richards could not have anticipated. When a text arrives with no author — generated, unattributed, stripped of provenance — the reader is in exactly the position of Richards's students. His experiment was, unintentionally, a study of what happens to judgement when the usual credentials are removed.

The afterlife#

Richards's method became the New Criticism in the United States, an approach he had mixed feelings about. He spent the later part of his career on Basic English, the 850-word restricted vocabulary he and Ogden developed, and taught at Harvard. He died in Cambridge after falling ill on a trip to China.

Also on this date#

Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, was born on 7 September 1707. As keeper of the Jardin du Roi he produced the thirty-six-volume Histoire naturelle, and in it did something that matters to the philosophy of biology: he gave the species concept an operational definition. Two animals belong to the same species if they can produce fertile offspring together.

That criterion moved "species" out of the metaphysics of essences — a species as a fixed natural kind with a defining essence — and into a relation between organisms that can be tested. It is the ancestor of the biological species concept, and of the long argument, still running, about whether species are kinds or individuals.

Buffon also estimated the age of the Earth from the cooling of iron spheres and arrived at roughly 75,000 years — wrong by orders of magnitude, but a deep-time argument made from an experiment rather than from scripture, and the Sorbonne's theology faculty censured him for less.

A. J. P. Taylor died on 7 September 1990. His The Origins of the Second World War (1961) is a standing case study for the philosophy of history: how far may a historian's method of explaining action by ordinary motives be pushed before it becomes an account nobody should accept?

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Each day in this column we take up an event from the history of philosophy that falls on today's date.