I. A. Richards on Metaphor and Rhetoric
A brief look at empiricist philosophy of language and its application to rhetorical theory
When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea . . . we need but inquire from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it is impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion. (Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec II:12)
This brief quotation illustrates three beliefs about language that are characteristic of British empiricists of the Enlightenment period, namely:
(1) The misuse of words is a matter of unclear or nonexistent reference
(2) All meaningful discourse is based on discourse about sensations
(3) Thought is prior to language
John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume are the typical representatives of this school of thought.
I. A. Richards's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) also exemplifies these beliefs, but Richards modifies each of them to some degree. Like C. S. Peirce, Richards may still be fairly classed as an empiricist, but his work diverges from traditional empiricism of the Enlightenment period in significant respects.
Richards’s work also naturally invites comparison with George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric. Campbell belongs to the same period as Hume, and Campbell’s work may be classed as basically empiricist, but Campbell also diverges from empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and instead adopts elements of the atypical empiricist theories of Thomas Reid.
I. The use and abuse of words
Empiricists from Bacon to Wittgenstein offer diagnoses of the ways in which words can mislead. Here is Francis Bacon (not exactly of the Enlightenment period but definitely an empiricist):
But the Idols of the Market-place are the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through the alliances of words and names . . .
The idols imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds. They are either names of things which do not exist . . . or they are names of things which exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities . . . . the [latter] class, which springs out of a faulty and unskilful abstraction, is intricate and deeply rooted. (Bk. I, Ch. 50)
Words for abstract ideas are often singled out for attention. George Berkeley devotes most of the introduction to his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge to the question of abstract ideas.
. . . it is proper to premise somewhat . . . concerning the nature and abuse of language . . . . what seems to . . . have occasioned innumerable errors and difficulties in almost all parts of knowledge . . . is the opinion that the mind has a power of framing abstract ideas or notions of things.
John Locke categorizes in detail the ways in which language can be faulty. He includes figurative language as a source of error:
But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness . . . are for nothing else but to . . . mislead the judgment; . . . . and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or the person who makes use of them. (Bk. III, Ch. 10:34)
Bacon and George Campbell, on the other hand, see rhetoric as positive and necessary, and figurative language as valuable. Bacon says, “the duty and office of Rhetoric is to apply Reason to the Imagination to better move the will” (Advancement of Learning, Bk.II), and Campbell also explicitly endorses gratifying an audience’s imagination (Bk. I, Ch.I).
Richards also is concerned about misunderstanding; indeed, he makes overcoming misunderstanding the central business of rhetoric: “Rhetoric . . . should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (3).
But Richards does not think that focusing on the meanings of individual words is the way to do this. He agrees with Aristotle that the sentence is the unit of discourse, and he argues against the “proper meaning superstition”, i.e., the belief that each individual word has or should have a fixed meaning. Richards says that the meaning of word depends on its context (11).
Richards also approves of metaphor; more than that, he says that it is inevitable (90). (See also III., below).
II. Reductionism
The way to avoid abusing words is suggested by the Hume quote, above. Words are used properly when there is a clear referent that can be specified in terms of some combination of sensory data. Words that fail to meet this test are shibboleths.
Hume, Berkeley, and Locke all offer formulae for analyzing meaningful discourse into the terms of observation and experience. This is “reduction” insofar as the apparently large number of entities mentioned in discourse is “reduced” to a relatively small number of component ideas, impressions, or perceptions. Hume, for example, proposes that all mental activity can be classified as “impressions” (the immediate experiences of sensation or emotion) and “ideas” (the “less lively copies” of impressions produced through reflection or memory). When properly used, words represent ideas (see III), which are derived from impressions, which are produced through contact with the environment (i.e., experience).
Richards offers a more complex formula for reduction. Richards explains the meanings of words not in terms of the internal mental states of speakers but rather in terms of the external causal states of their environment. Words and other signs have a “delegated efficacy”, and “what a word means is the missing parts of the contexts from which it draws its delegated efficacy” (35). That is, events have effects, words stand for events, and words have the effects of the events they stand for. For example, one of Columbus's sailors, stationed in the crow’s nest, sees land at last and yells “Land ho!” (In Spanish, of course). This has an effect on the other sailors which is comparable to the effect that would be produced by actually seeing land themselves, even though some of them might not be able to see the land from where they stand (thus, that part of the context is missing for them). “Land ho!” means the event of detecting the distant coastline, because it produces the effect of that event. All of the sailors who hear “Land ho!” experience that effect, even though only one of them actually detects the coastline. In fact, the words would have the same effect even if the lookout was “crying wolf” (incidentally, Richards's theory of meaning also explains why the cry “Wolf!” loses its causal efficacy in the fable).
Although Richards’s formula is more complex than that of earlier empiricists, it still explains meaning in terms of experience. He does not make use of any innate ideas or anything like Chomsky’s postulated language acquisition device that might precede or be independent of experience.
In this respect, Richards is closer to Hume than to Campbell, who, following Reid, says that “common sense” is the source of a number of beliefs that approximately correspond to those that Kant calls “synthetic a priori”.
Another difference is Richards's realism, which contrasts with the generally nominalist trend in empiricism. Berkeley says,
. . . . words become general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea, but of several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind. (op. cit)
but Richards says,
. . . we begin with the general abstract anything, split it, as the world makes us, into sorts, and then arrive at concrete particulars by the overlapping or common membership of these sorts. (31)
In this respect Richards is comparable to Peirce. Richards sums up his reduction formula thus:
. . . a word is normally a substitute for (or means) not one discrete past impression but a combination of general aspects. (93)
III. Language, thought, and reality
All of the thinkers mentioned so far would agree that language and thought are two different things. Words represent ideas or thoughts; ideas represent (or in Berkeley’s case, are) reality. None identifies language with thought, nor does any seem to subscribe to a Whorfian view of language and thought, except insofar as thought can be misled by the misuse of words. Berkeley seems to go the furthest concerning the independence of thought from language, supposing that complex thought is possible without language (cf. quotes in Richards, 4-5); Locke is not far behind. Bacon seems to go furthest in allowing language to influence thought, though this still seems to be mainly a cause for concern: “For men believe that their reason governs words; but it is also true that words react on the understanding, and this it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive” (Novum Organum, Bk III, Ch. 49).
Richards, however, does not wish to view language as a mere “dress” for thought.
We shall do better to think of meaning as a plant which has grown rather than a can that has been filled or a lump of clay that has been molded” (12).
Meaning “grows” through the use of metaphor. What Richards says about metaphor is somewhat like what Campbell says about analogy, but is more complex.
According to Richards, metaphor is not mere verbal embellishment, it is inevitable and essential to both thought and language (90-91, 94). He explains metaphor in terms of “tenor” and “vehicle”. The “tenor” is “the underlying idea or principal subject which the vehicle or figure means” (97). He also says that “. . . vehicle and tenor in co-operation give a meaning of more varied powers than can be ascribed to either” (100), presumably because metaphors involve the causal efficacy of both. Metaphoric thought involves making increasingly complex and abstract comparisons, creating increasingly powerful causal networks. Perhaps the best examples of this come from the histories of important scientific and technological discoveries, such as Archimedes's discovery of his eponymous principle in his bathtub, or the scientist who figured out the structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake swallowing its tail.
IV. Evaluation
Richards's causal theory of meaning is suggestive, but as an explanation of meaning it is unsatisfactory because, as Hume shows, causality is as mysterious as meaning, so that it is a case of explaining one obscure phenomenon by another. More importantly, it says nothing about the key feature of meaning, namely understanding. That is what distinguishes the human being who, in Richards's terms, can think of concepts from the amoeba who can only “behave or think” with concepts (31). Words would have no causal efficacy without this, so unless Richards can explain how language users understand words, his causal theory of meaning doesn’t really explain anything. (Commanding a dog to sit has causal efficacy without understanding, perhaps, but this is not the kind of language use that Richards is trying to explain.)
Richards is right about the importance of metaphor, however. Some truths are too big to be expressed in simple literal terms. At the risk of begging the question, here is an analogical argument in support of this view, using Locke’s terminology as the vehicle: just as human sensory and cognitive systems cannot apprehend the myriad “primary qualities” (i.e., shape, size, motion) of the countless microscopic “corpuscles” that make up our world, but must apprehend them in terms of “secondary qualities” (such as color and texture) of macroscopic space, so must people apprehend the complexity of their physical, mental, social, and spiritual relationships and experiences through the use of metaphor.
Works Cited:
Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. Bk. I, Secs. 49-50. In Bizzell & Herzberg (q.v.).
Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Introduction. In Cahn (q.v.).
Bizzell, Patricia & Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition, 1st ed. Boston: Bedford Books, 1990.
Cahn, Steven M. Classics of Western Philosophy, 5th ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999.
Campbell, George. The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Ch. I, Ch. V Sec II Part 1. In Bizzell & Herzberg (q.v.).
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. II:12, in Cahn (q.v.).
Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III. In Bizzell & Herzberg. (q.v.).
Peirce, Charles S. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”, “Logic as Semiotic”, “Pragmatism in Retrospect: A Last Formulation”, in Philosophocal Writings of Peirce. Justus Buchler, ed. New York: Dover, 1955.
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press, 1936.