The Meaning of Meaning

The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923) is a book by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. It is accompanied by two supplementary essays by Bronisław Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank.

Although the original text was published in 1923 it has been used as a textbook in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science and most recently semantics and semiotics in general. The book has been in print continuously since 1923. The most recent edition is the critical edition prepared by W. Terrence Gordon as volume 3 of the 5-volume set C. K. Ogden & Linguistics (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995). The full publication history, including serialised publication in The Cambridge Magazine prior to the first edition of the book, is in W. Terrence Gordon's, C. K. Ogden: a bio-bibliographical study (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990).

Richards sets forth a contextual theory of Signs: that Words and Things are connected “through their occurrence together with things, their linkage with them in a ‘context’ that Symbols come to play that important part in our life [even] the source of all our power over the external world” (47). In this context system, Richards develops a tri-part semiotics—symbol, thought and referent with three relations between them (thought to symbol=correct, thought–referent=adequate, symbol–reference=true) (11). Symbols are “those signs which men use to communicate one with another and as instruments of thought, occupy a peculiar place” (23). “All discursive symbolization involves […] weaving together of contexts into higher contexts” (220). So for a word to be understood “requires that it form a context with further experiences” (210).

The book would later influence A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, an introduction to Logical Positivism, and both the Richards–Ogden book and the Ayer book would, in turn, influence Alec King and Martin Ketley in the writing of their book The Control of Language, which appeared in 1939, and which influenced C. S. Lewis in the writing of his defence of natural law and objective values, The Abolition of Man (1943).