Transcript I.A. Richards

I.A. Richards
Begins with the psychobiological origin of man's
drive for expression.
Claims to be Platonic and dialectic.
Sees metaphor as central
Understands "rhetoric" as the total
communication process, but
accepts George Campbell's definition: ‘The
Process of adapting speech to its end’ and
defines "rhetoric" as “study of misunderstandings
and their remedy.”
Meaning
• The meaning of a word or phrase is not its
dictionary equivalent, but the difference its
utterance brings about in a situation.
• All thinking is metaphoric: to think of
something is to take it as of a sort.
Universal sign situation
• Thinking and communication are events
and have meaning insofar as we are able
to relate the stimuli to some past
experience .
• Awareness of the relationship between
stimulus and antecedents/consequents
results from the interaction of the stimulus
with similar experiences in the past.
Context of position (single encounter)
Context of the individual (memory)
Reference (thought)
Causal relationship
Causal relationship
Symbol
Referent
(the word)
(what the word
“stands for”
imputed relationship