2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of C. K. (Charles Kay) Ogden and I. A. (Ivor Armstrong) Richards’ 1923 book, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language on Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, which the late Umberto Eco termed “A seminal book, whose merit was to say certain things in advance of its time” in the preface he wrote for the 1989 edition.
Although differentiating among the objective (denotation) and subjective (connotation) meanings of words is taken for granted today, The Meaning of Meaning pioneered in inveighing against what it termed “word magic” (the common belief that words are so self-explanatory they seldom need any examination or interpretation), providing an exhaustive overview of how philosophers of language and logic such as Frege, Russell, and Peirce had dealt in different ways with what words “mean,” and offering their own more psychologically-based perspective.
The book was a decided success, though several contemporary reviewers found it lacking in empirical support for the behavioral aspects of its theorizing. For instance, the philosopher Max Black criticized it for being “inadequately supported . . . by empirical evidence, concerning hypothetical features of bodily behavior constituting the factors which causally determine the occurrence of simple acts of interpretation; that in default of the requisite evidence the supposition that some such theory must be true is symptomatic of an a priori partiality for certain types of explanation; that the practical applications drawn from the theory are independent of and unsupported by it; and that the mode of procedure involved is characteristic not only of other behavioristic theories of language, but of much pseudo-scientific philosophizing.”
The Meaning of Meaning, however, is most often remembered today for a single diagram on its page 11, the so-called “semiotic triangle.” In his 2013 doctoral thesis, “Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C.K. Ogden and His Contemporaries,” James McElvenny explains that “Each of the points in the triangle represents an entity assumed to be involved in an act of reference; the sides in turn illustrate the relations between these entities. A ‘symbol’, a word or any other type of sign, evokes a ‘thought or reference’, an idea or ‘image’ in the mind of the hearer or perceiver of the sign, which is then directed to a ‘referent’, some entity or object in the world. Ogden and Richards do not restrict their account to the purely linguistic. They base their model on the notion of ‘engram’, proposed by the Lamarckian evolutionary biologist Richard Semon (1859–1918; Ogden and Richards 1989[1923]:52 acknowledge the source of this term in Semon 921[1904]), which is a mental impression of the relation between two entities in the world formed after repeatedly observing their co-occurrence” (page 20).
This “semiotic triangle” graphic is very often applied to C.S. Peirce’s triad of Sign, Object, and Interpretant, especially since Ogden and Richard’s assumption of memory involved in the process of “after repeatedly observing their co-occurrence” in their model can be viewed as congruent with Peirce’s use of “habit” in his. Since Ogden and Richards were clearly familiar with Peirce’s work (they discuss it in some detail in pages 279-290), it is interesting that they chose to utilize the German biologist Semon’s work instead, especially as the story has it that the origin of their book was in a conversation the two had on the evening of Armistice Day (November, 11, 1918), a day on which Ogden’s Cambridge bookshop was ransacked by rioters who viewed him as a dangerous propagandist of pacifism and a mere six weeks before Semon was to take his own life in Munich, apparently depressed by the recent death of his wife, his own failing memory, the lack of recognition for his work, and by Germany’s crushing defeat in the world war. The power of words and the varieties of meanings that these can convey to influence human action were probably extraordinarily clear to all three men.
Semon’s first major book on memory was not to be translated into English until 1921, at which time it began to attract serious scholarly attention, though Richards did critique some of Semon’s engram examples in his own 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism. More importantly, despite some initial enthusiasm among scientists, a general inability to experimentally confirm the existence of Semon’s “engrams” in memory led to a subsequent period of scientific neglect.
However, Semon’s concept of “engram” (which is today viewed as “a sparse subset of neurons recruited during experience, and the experience can be recalled with reactivation of these neurons”) is enjoying a revival in recent years, as contemporary neuroscience has advanced technically to the point that it is becoming feasible to determine how the memory and its traces function, though there are still many conceptual and experimental challenges to be overcome, not least the negative connotation that the word “engram” now has due to its unfortunate association with Ron Hubbard’s book, Dianetics (though the word itself has very different meanings in the science of neuropsychology and in the pseudo-science of Scientology.)
Both Ogden and Richards were fascinating individuals: Ogden worked with Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922 to publish the first English translation of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while Richards was a brilliant teacher long remembered by his students at Harvard and elsewhere.
They had productive scholarly careers well after the success of The Meaning of Meaning: Ogden as the inventor of “Basic English“, based on his theory that all meaningful concepts in the English language could be conveyed in a select list of 850 English words, a project which still exists today, and Richards as a founder of the so-called “New Criticism” and internationally-recognized scholar in literary criticism and interpretation. Ogden died in 1957 and Richards in 1979.
Clearly all three (Ogden, Richards, Semon) deserve to be remembered today, beyond a footnote to Peircean scholarship, which is all I allocated in Chapter 2, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit.
Keywords In and Out of Context 