The Philosophy of Rhetoric


Abstract:
Some tidbits from I.A Richards' The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1936)

Body:
One of my favorite Richards passages concerns the difference between very fluid and metaphorical language (like poetry) and the rigid, technical language of certain scientific disciplines. I think there is a jab here at logical positivism. He says:

Unfortunately we tend - increasingly since the 17th Century - to take rigid discourse as the norm, and impose its standards upon the rest of speech. This is much as if we thought that water, for all its virtues, in canals, baths, and turbines, were really a weak form of ice. (48)

This guy is a master of metaphor himself. "A weak form of ice!" How wonderful!

Later on, Richards refers to a dispute over the word "colorful," which apparently came into vogue about 1890. Many did not like the word, and asserted that it was more proper to say, "full of color." He addresses the issue using the phrase "snob control of the language," then says,

The interesting objection, against such words as colorful, concerns vulgarity. It is an objection that many new words are open to because they are often taken up most readily by people the objectors like to describe so. Moreover, that a word should be popular is often the chief condition for its admission into the language and to some people popular means what vulgar means. But a word like colorful can evidently be used in many different ways with different meanings, and to compare these is the way to judge it. We would not judge a quadruped without deciding whether it is a horse or a dog. (84)

I especially like what he says about vulgarity and popularity!

On controversy:

A controversy is normally an exploitation of a systematic set of misunderstandings for war-like purposes. (39)

On meaning:

Anyone who publishes a book with the word "Meaning" in its title becomes the recipient of a fan-mail of peculiar character. In comes a dribble of letters ever after from people who are quite unmistakably lunatics. Indeed, it seems that the subject is a dangerous one. Intense preoccupation with the sources of our meanings is disturbing, increasing our sense that our beliefs are a veil and an artificial veil between ourselves and something that otherwise through a veil we can never know. Something of the same sort can happen in travel. Anyone who has visited a sufficiently strange country and come into close contact with its life knows how unsettling... is the recognition of the place of conventions in our mental world. (42)

On metaphor and poetry:

The patient toil of scores of teachers is going every day, in courses about the appreciation of poetry, into the effort to make children (and adults) visualize where visualization is mere distraction and no service. ...For words cannot, and should not attempt to "hand over sensations bodily"; they have very much more important work to do. ...Words are the meeting points at which regions of experience which can never combine in sensation or intuition, come together. They are the occasion and the means of that growth which is the mind's endless endeavor to order itself. That is why we have language. It is no mere signaling system. It is the instrument of all our distinctively human development, of everything in which we go beyond the other animals. (131)

This is an excellent short book, and one which should be required reading for preachers. It should also be required reading for anyone wading into emerging church arguments - especially the bit about controversy!

Posted: Fri - October 21, 2005 at 07:14 AM           |

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