The Meaning of Meaning

by Charles Kay Ogden, Ivor A. Richards

Language is the most important of all the instruments of civilization. This is the premise of a work whose significance to the study of language, literature, and philosophy has remained undiminished since its original publication in 1923. New Introduction by Umberto Eco; Indices.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics, Nonfiction, Language, Psychology, Literary Criticism

396 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

Charles Kay Ogden, who generally published as C.K. Ogden , was a linguist, translator, and philosopher.

Reviews

[Leon M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books about philosophy of language always make my head go round in circles. This one did, too. But if you take the time to read and re-read the important bits, you gain an understanding of the importance of the subject and maybe even an understanding of the "Meaning of Meaning" itself.

One of the main points the book makes is the prevalence of the "proper meaning superstition" and the fact that there can be no serious discussion of the philosophy of language prior to its abolition. The proper meaning superstition is the (false) belief that every word has one exact meaning and that this meaning is part of the word. According to the authors, meaning does not reside within the words but within the humans using them.

To explain their concept of the relations between referent (what a word is used to refer to), symbol (a word) and reference (the connection between symbol and word, i.e. the interpreter), the authors introduce the model of a semiotic triangle. In this triangle, each of the three related entities (referent, symbol and interpreter) is assigned an edge: Referent in the lower right-hand corner, symbol in the lower left-hand corner and the reference on the top of the triangle. The most fundamental proposition of the book can be reduced to the assertion that there this triangle does not have a basis: There is no direct connection between referent and symbol (contrary to the proper meaning superstition). Symbol and referent are only related through an interpreter, who translates the symbol into a referent or vice versa.

Having established this basic proposition, the authors go on to analyze sign-situations in general and symbol-situations in particular. A sign is a natural representation of something that exceeds the sign (a barking sound may be a sign for a dog, for instance). A symbol, on the other hand, is a special kind of sign: It does not have a natural connection to its referent (unlike normal signs), but only a purely conventional one: The word "dog" is only connected with dogs because it is used to refer to dogs. Were the word "madgs" used to refer to dogs, the word "dog" would have no connection whatsoever with a dog.

The first thing to consider when talking about language is thought, simply because their is no use of language without thought. The special case of thought that must be examined before language can be dealt with is the interpretation of signs - the interpretation of symbols is only a special sub-case of this activity.

The interpretation of signs is stated most concisely by the authors themselves as being "our psychological reaction to it [the sign], as determined by our past experience in similiar situations, and by our present experience" (p. 244). So when we hear a dog barking, we assume that it is a dog because in our past experience the barking sound has generally been accompanied by the existence and close proximity of one of these creatures.
The same interpretative process applies for symbols.

The problem found in communication is the fact that their is no direct relation between referent and symbol, making the interpretation the central aspect of communication. To be able to function, any system of symbols (=language) must accept the six fundamental Canons of Symbolism, derived from the nature of thinking:

1) One symbol stands for one and only one referent.
2) Symbols which can be substituted for another stand for the symbolize the same reference.
3) The referent of a contracted symbol is the referent of that symbol expanded.
4) A symbol refers to what it is actually used to refer to.
5) No complex symbol may contain constituent symbols which take the same place.
6) All possible referents together form an order, such that every referent has one place only in that order.

Now that the basic rules of communication have been laid out, the only problem still left is finding a way to eliminate misunderstanding within this system: This is what the "Theory of Definition" aims at. This theory gives eight ways to define a symbol so that both listener and speaker may be clear they are interpreting the symbol as the same referent:

1) Symbolization
2) Similarity
3) Spatial Relations
4) Temporal Relations
5) Physical Causation
6) Psychological Causation
7) Psycho-physical Causation
8) Being the Object of a Mental State

Of course, there are other ways of defining symbols, but most of them are specific to a special subject (such as legal definitions) and most (if not all) of them can be reduced to the eight mentioned above.

One of the most interesting ideas of the Theory of Definition is that there are definitions that do not mean anything and therefore act purely as irritants, supporting a particular orator simply by confusing his audience. Such irritants must be recognized and ignored. Examples are Croce's "the sublime is everything this is or will be so called by those who have employed or shall employ the name" and - to the date my favourite - Ziercke's "Etwas vom Gesetzgeber Verbotenes dem öffentlichen Zugriff zu entziehen, kann keine Zensur sein".

Armed with the theory of definition, Ogden and Richards set out to search for the meaning of beauty and the meaning of meaning in the next two chapters.

In the final chapter (called "Symbol Situations") the authors finally apply their theory of interpretation to so-called symbol situations. Their analysis of the processes of language interpretation is separated into the side of the listener and the speaker.

The side of the listener is not very complicated, as he behaves quite exactly in the same way as he does when interpreting signs: The only new idea is that of complex symbols. A listener may interpret two symbols in each others context and that may give him a new referent (other than the two simple referents of the two symbols each).

The speakers side is more complex because one cannot find a strict symbolization attitude with most speakers: Speakers do not simply symbolize referents, but they may use several of up to five functions of language:

1) Symbolization of reference
2) Expression of attitude to listener
3) Expression of attitude to referent
4) The promotion of effects intended
5) The support of the reference

More generally speaking, there are two important functions of language: The strict symbolization, in which facts are transferred from one to another. And the evocative or emotive use of language, which aims to promote certain emotions and feelings within the listener. The confusion of these two has been responsible for much of the discussions and controversy between scientists and poets.

All in all, "The Meaning of Meaning" is an illuminating enquiry into the nature of thought and the relation between thought and language.

[Owlseyes]

"He who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know"
Lao Tse

[سعود · Rating 5 out of 5]

يُقنِعُ الناس أنفسهم بالكلمات أَنفُسِها التي يستعملها الناس، كما لو أن الصوت الواحد يحمِل بالضرورة المعنى نَفسهُ.

لاشك في أن ثمة فنّاً ما في قول شيءٍ ما حين لا يوجد ما يُقال

[Gary Bruff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning
Malinowski, The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages

“The modern logician may, in time to come, be regarded as the true mystic, when the rational basis of the world in which he believes is scientifically examined.” – Meaning of Meaning (p.40)

1923. About a century ago, there was a massive efflorescence of new theories about language, especially theories that dealt with how language relates to thought. In the first few years of the roaring twenties, linguists like Edward Sapir and Otto Jespersen were tracking along the frontiers of possible thought and expression by examining how meaning arises in ‘exotic’ languages like Choctaw or Chinese. Ludwig Wittgenstein was at the same time working out his ideas about logical atomism (with Bertrand Russel), postulating the limits of the world as the break between what can be known factually through language and what cannot be so known. Meanwhile, in the arena of literary language, T. S. Eliot devised a powerful, modernist poetry, evoking a mortal, arid landscape of loss and loneliness through the magic of the English language let off its leash. Andre Breton, in his 1923 surrealist manifesto, made use of what were then modern ideas from psychoanalysis to perform feats of automatic writing, in which the writer surrenders the pen entirely to his or her subconscious, to the dream matrix of thought-language. Also in 1923, against this backdrop of wild speculations on and adventuresome explorations of the language/thought nexus, The Meaning of Meaning emerged as Ogden and Richards’ masterwork. The Meaning of Meaning entices the modern individual to move beyond word magic and to attain a scientific knowledge of how symbol, thought, and referent are interdependent. The Meaning of Meaning also features a forty page supplement by the anthropologist Branislaw Malinowski, who underlined O&R’s point that meaning includes a practical and frequently social activity and is not merely the countersign of thought.

Word Magic, i. It is human, all to human, to believe that words have a meaning independent of how they might be used. Occult powers are sometimes attributed to words when they are perceived as having an existence independent from both their current use and the memory of their prior use. Consider some word magic from a century ago: “100% Americanism” and “Return to Normalcy.” These jingoist slogans were populist propaganda in 1923, part of a reaction against the economic and ethnic upheaval brought on by the American labor movement during the early 20th century. Yet there is no logical way one can determine what a “normal, 100%” American is. The 100% normal ‘American’ is rather an ideological abstraction, a bit of word magic intended to inflame a nativist and chauvinist opposition between us and them--between normal folk like us, and those folks considered too abnormal to make the grade.

Sodium Chloride. In The Meaning of Meaning, there can be no natural bond between words and things, which is what Saussure had in mind when discussing the arbitrariness of the sign. For O&R, the best we can hope for is to scientifically fix word meanings to their contexts of use in the physical and psychological world. Hence, salt can be defined, as Bloomfield would later define it, as NaCl. Yet the vast majority of our ideas are grounded in experience and not in science. One can imagine a primitive tribe with a word for salt but with no idea what sodium chloride might be. So even if NaCl is sufficient to define any object called (common table) salt, it has little to do with the meaning of the word salt. Meaning is not just about statements of fact and definitions. There is an element of emotion in meaning as well. If someone hurts you when you are down, you might say they are ‘rubbing salt into your wounds.’ The meaning of this idiom can come from the memory of a certain harsh experience with salt, but its meaning is more likely to derive from tradition or convention. We learn the meaning of this expression from our memories of past usage and possibly from a personal experience with a wound coming into contact with salt. The ionic bond between sodium and chlorine, while significant to the chemist, has no role in the psychological, philosophical, and anthropological meanings of the word salt.

Venus. Gottlob Frege was responsible for an interesting logic problem. If the morning star is Venus, and if the evening star is Venus, and if Venus is Venus, then the morning star is the evening star. I once took a class in the philosophy of language where I was alone in the class in feeling that the morning star is not the evening star. If i said in the morning, “Look, there’s the evening star,” while pointing at Venus, I feel I would have said something false. This is attributable to the fact that meaning emerges from contexts. Part of the context is made up of the speech act situation itself. But also contextually significant are the speaker’s or addressee's memories of the logical, rhetorical or grammatical contexts of every past speech act employing the words “evening star.” All meaning emerges this way, as the outcome of a causal chain stretching historically from a word’s coinage, through its history of use, and up to its current usage contexts from which the speaker or hearer learn the expression.

Semiotics. In their philosophical psychology, informed by hermeneutics and phenomenology, O&R propose a cognitive mediation between word and reference. According to word magic, there is a direct link between a word or statement and the thing or fact referred to. In semiotic systems, like the one O&R developed, signification is a two step process: there is a relation of symbols to thoughts, together with a second relation of thoughts to objects/facts. By analyzing signification as an articulated process and not as a magic bond between word and thing, O&R open vistas to central themes found in later 20th century cognitive linguistics and analytical philosophy. I have already mentioned the causal account of meaning. But O&R also point out the semantic linkage between ‘meaning’ as instrument of understanding and ‘meaning’ as simple intention (think of “she didn’t mean it” or “he was well-meaning, but…”). In French, vouloir dire, ‘intend to say,’ more frequently means ‘to mean.’ Well before Grice did, O&R saw relevance as the psychological context which ties together other contexts. And long before the cognitive turn in linguistics, O&R comprehended how an act of metaphor figuratively associates two referents with a single symbol.

Malinowski. The Meaning of Meaning features a supplement by the then well-respected anthropologist Branislaw Malinowski. Malinowski too saw all meaning as grounded in contexts of situations and acts of reference. But there are important differences between O&R and Malinowski. While O&R presupposed a literate westerner as their meaning-maker, Malinowski was more concerned with the illiterate Melanesian natives. The Melanesians dwelt in social contexts that differ remarkably from those we are used to. The natives in fact had ‘untranslatable ideas’ that the anthropologist must seek to explain: notions of “social order, beliefs, customs, ceremonies, rites,” etc. Malinowski makes much about how society is constituted through phatic communion, whereby people become tied together (a channel of communication is established, in Jakobsonian terms) through the act of verbal communication itself, without regard to what is actually said. And language performs many functions besides sharing meaning-reference or creating a community. Language makes all kinds of unified social action possible. However, while the primitives seem to lack the level of abstraction found among literate populations, they nevertheless invariably possess a sophisticated grammar rooted in universal functional distinctions. Thus, every language has nouns and verbs, so they also have pronouns or aspect distinctions. In fact, all human languages show a fundamental agreement in structure and means of grammatical expression. But despite his confidence in something which approaches Chomsky’s idea of universal grammar, Malinowski famously held prejudiced and even racist views. For him, the primitive is really childlike in his mental operations, like a baby who discovers that a name has power over the person or thing signified. For the child as for the primitive, language is about effecting action, and not much about serving as an instrument of reflection.

Word Magic, ii. O&R had hoped to start a movement to transform how people used language. The aim was to abolish word magic from those covens of academia, and hopefully from our entire civilization. But a hundred years on, word magic is alive and well and people as a mass are no better than they have ever been at thinking in clear, unambiguous, and logically consistent terms. In part because language reform seems Orwellian, fascist, Stalinist; and in part because the underclasses always see the mutation of everyday language as a boundary mechanism or instrument of defense against school-marmish prescriptivism; and in part because the effort to hold onto hatred, a hatred most frequently expressed in words and not in physical violence, governs too many people’s interactions with those others who have emerged from unfamiliar contexts; for all these reasons, the hope for achieving progress through language stabilization or language improvement seems like a century old dream, one unlikely to come true. In 1923, people still hoped for progress. But the progressive era was over.

[Alex Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

In many ways, this is a very unsatisfying book. Since it is written in the early 20th century, coming with this book is a reading of structuralism that is not quite formed, but definitely in full swing. The title is apt, but also guaranteed to be a let down, because if anything the book doesn't come close to providing any meaning of meaning, although that is what it is about.

As considered, the text was revolutionary for its time. You can see that the two rhetoricians went far in their attempt to flesh out the topic of their book. But given its inconclusiveness, what were they hoping to do? How can anyone write a book with this little conclusion? Nonetheless, apparently this text was highly influential for its time. I gave it two stars because I am reading it today, although if I read this 70 years ago (I wasn't alive 70 years ago) I may have felt differently.

Nonetheless the title is apt, because they are looking at the whole of language for meaning. Despite their formalistic leanings, they fail to recognize that meaning is inherent only within a logic when viewed from the outside. Meaning in this sense is orientation -- but it is not a fixture of a system. When you are within a system, the very rituals and gestures attain a meaninglessness about it. So they do recognize this; but also fail to reconcile that meaning is produced when you are in one logic moving within a different logic. In other words, within the logics of language there is transcendence and there is immanence. The dialectical interaction between these two, respectively "inside" and "outside" create the experience of meaning.

Still, there is much information to be gained here, although it is a preliminary text. In this sense, as an influential marker of the time, it is well worth studying, although our grasp on the subject has passed this book up. I suppose in this sense, as a relic, it is more like an open letter; some experts writing to any other experts out there, who might care to respond. And in that sense, it is meaningful. But as a precise marker of the conversation today, it is meaningless since it doesn't add anything -- it presents no new logic, no new formalistic relations we might use, so to speak.

Given my curiousity on the subject, I can't pass up reading a title like this. So I'm glad I read it. But it added very little to my understanding on the one hand, but also helped me shore up the understanding that I do have, on the other.

[Van · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, there are some real gems in this book. Sometimes I can rate a book by how much I write on the margins of the book. I write a lot in the margins of this book. Sometimes it isn't really from the ideas in the book as much as they provoke my thinking about my ideas. I also like the historical aspect of reading a book that is about 90 years old and those (at that time) new authors he quotes and I also like his love (and my love) of footnotes. And, this said, the writing style was often tough for me to decipher and frustrating at what appeared to me as being unnecessarily complex. So, because of this, 2.5 stars.

[Anna Bosman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Paged through rather than read, and since I can't see myself finishing it in either near or distant future, I'd rather remove it from the to-read list where the book clearly doesn't belong. It proved too abstract for my liking and happened to catch me in precisely that transition state when you become more aware of the strangeness and intrigue of the material world, giving up the in-depth studies of its bony abstract reflections in the verbal mirrors made by fellow human beings. Rationalisation can't go any further than where this book takes it, and that's a pill I just couldn't swallow.

[Andrew]

It's been 100 years or so since Ogden and Richards laid down this seminal text, and like so many seminal texts, a lot of it is going to come off as a "duh" for everyone who has studied the subject matter, in this case semantics and semiotics. Really, the two authors try to provide a thorough and exacting account of meaning, even at the expense of reaching any kind of satisfying thesis. The high structuralism of the whole thing isn't very pleasant to slog through either. It is important, and it is worthwhile. But, as with anything this rich, it's best eaten in small bites.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay. Less fun than Philosophy of Rhetoric was, and less immediately applicable to rhetoric. Darn structuralists--seems like I'm becoming quite well-read in them quite inadvertently. There are maybe 3 or 4 chapters that are fulfilling, and, admittedly, it took a little cross-research to understand what they were shooting for. On the plus side, I got to contribute to Wikipedia on this one. Can I count that as a publication?

[Kyle Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun! 

The material is obviously very dated, but it's interesting to see how much they were able to correctly diagnose a century ago. "The influence of Language upon Thought has attracted the attention of the wise and foolish alike" and could not be more essential to our understanding of knowledge and meaning. All communication, all expression, perhaps all or most of thought (if Sapir-Whorf is correct) is achieved through this construction we call "words," and yet we can only understand the meaning of words in relation to other words. We are all playing Wittgenstein's Language Games, and our ability to know anything at all about the world must first be filtered through these indirect and imperfect signs that our cultural history has built for us with minimal guidance or forethought. And yet, as the author's correctly point out, centuries of philosophers had ignored or neglected the importance of this filter, and have treated these signs as if they might be exact and exhaustive in their descriptive capacity. 

I think the author's attempts to fix this are inspired and impressive, but also overly ambitious and often misguided. It is impressive how much they got right, despite preceding the last century's developments in linguistics, semiotics, psychology, the Vienna circle, Derrida, etc. Honestly, even if they wrote this a single decade later, after getting to see what Gödel's incompleteness theorem did to mathematics, I think you would have a very different book—I doubt, for example, that they would have put nearly as much weight on their axioms (or "canons") of symbolism. But they didn't know what they couldn't know, so their attempt at developing a science of meaning falls short in a number of ways. One misconception that stood out to me in particular was their continuous, misguided distinction between the logical and emotive uses of language, or what they call the "prose" and "poetic" uses. The idea that these uses are at odds or distinguishable is, I think, fundamentally off-base, even according to their own criteria. The correspondence of words to the vastness of experience is not and can never be exhaustive—between them exist deep worlds of meaning that have never been expressed linguistically, and projecting the meaning of words into new and unfamiliar contexts in an attempt to illuminate those voids is, in my view, one of the principle goals of poetry. We will never succeed at building language into a science of expression because words are fundamentally not up for the task, there will always be room for their meaning to expand and contract into new depths of experience; we will always need new axioms, the system is incomplete. The best we can hope to do is understand how we construct meaning through words, how that construction evolves over time, and how to best avoid misusing or misinterpreting those signs. And for that, even a century later, this book still has much to say. 

An interesting side note: According to Wiki, apparently this book had a big influence on Wes Anderson when he was getting his philosophy degree at UT. I think that tracks!

[Stephen Antczak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting work on "the science of symbolism, and about how language influences thought." At times difficult to understand, and other times actually humorous. I found it especially enlightening when it used the triangle graphic to explain their idea regarding the relationship between the referent (i.e. what is being referred to), the symbol being used to refer to it (i.e. the word "dog" to refer to a dog), and the thought, or reference being made (i.e. the activity of attaching the symbol dog to the object being referred to, and all that this entails). So, when somebody says the word dog it causes the act of thinking or referring to an object, in this case the category dog represented by one or many examples (image of a dog, experiences with a dog, what is known about dogs, etc.).

I also liked the chapter on the different ways the word "meaning" is defined and used, oftentimes, apparently, without much thought as to which definition is in play. This resulted in some excellent criticisms on how the word "meaning" is used in philosophy, psychology, literature, etc. There are 16 different definitions in 3 categories. The upshot is a general critique of the way language is used, and how it can be used more effectively, which can be summarized here: "What is required is not only strictness of definition and rigidity of expression, but also plasticity, ease and freedom in rapid expansion when expansion is needed."

I only skimmed the appendices and supplementary material, but I fund the Introduction by Umberto Eco to be worth reading.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was one if not THE most difficult books I’ve read. My star rating reflects this.
Discussing causal relations between thought and symbols, thoughts and referents and symbols and referents sets the tone.
Further delving into words, signs, perception, symbolism, definition - forces you further down a rabbit hole.
Ultimately leading you to meaning as it relates to aesthetics to meaning and the philosophers view and synonyms of meaning.
It seems fitting Umberto Eco wrote the introduction of my copy.
I finished the text of this book but could not tread into the appendix’s and supplements for fear my small grasp of the subject would be unraveled and I’d be left with no use of language at all.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two synchronicities were coming quickly: the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, a volume of whose I was scheduled to read next, but I moved it so that I could buy it thru my Amazon Fire tablet, was mentioned in the introduction and then discussed in detail in the final third of the book, and also the poetry of Walt Whitman was referenced, which was noteworthy because he was also mentioned in Clement Greenberg's indubitable criticism of American art movements, "Art & Culture", which I read simultaneously with this analysis of the concept of how meaning is conveyed in language. If that wasn't enough to get you to roll your eyes, the person of Clive Bell was mentioned in both books as I read them in bed on Thursday, September 2nd, 2021.

[Eric Chevlen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is the literary equivalent of a strip-tease. It always seems as if it’s about to reveal something exciting, slowly building up to the long-awaited moment, but it never gets there. So many words and so little coherence! Having read “The Meaning of Meaning,” it’s still not clear to me what the authors meant to say. If, as the blurb on the jacket cover says, this is a foundational work in semiology, it is of no more use to the modern reader than Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.”

Not recommended.

[Sybiee Colvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book of questions and bia's !

[Morgan Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

They got some interesting points, but on the whole reflective of the anti-curiosity of early 20th century "philosophy"

[Muhammad Yusra · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading almost half of the book, I don't think completing it is necessary, especially after understanding the place of this book in Ogden's grand project of Basic English. And this book is more normative than its theoretic title suggests. But it's a good read nonetheless.

What Ogden tried to attempt at was to establish an efficient language (English) with only 850 words and able to exposit everything, including science and philosophy. To ensure these 850 words being used properly, Ogden then devised a system of meanings (what he called the science of symbolism, theory of signs, etc) which can, hopefully, prevent the problems of intention, equivocality, ambiguity, etc.

So, as far as his work concerns, it was to design language, not to explain and understand it. That is not my current concern - nor I think it will ever be.

[Jeffry Larson]

Supplement II reinforced my nominalism.

[danielle; ▵ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I had better to say than that this book is both dense and sparse and that I disagreed frequently with its use of commas (might be due to its age, but such things I cannot easily forgive).