Linguistickiness.

On Ogden/Richards:

In the footnote discussion of grammatical exigencies (and, subsequently, their usefulness/necessity/nature) in Ch. 6 of The Meaning of Meaning, the authors argue: “so far from a grammar – the structure of a symbol system – being a reflection of the structure of the world, any supposed structure of the world is more probably a reflection of the grammar used” (96). The footnote then directs the reader to the appended material “On Grammar” which begins by quoting a condemnation of grammatical teaching. Ogden and Richards note: “it is not surprising that the best-informed philologists should feel that no words can be too strong for the grammatical fare on which the twentieth century child is still nourished” (251). The fascinating statement about grammar, then, does not begin with grammar itself but with frustration with the procedures and features of elementary grammar education. That the Appendix “On Grammar” would begin so illuminates a larger issue in the study (and in Saussure’s, and in any academic/theoretical study): namely, “why do these things matter?” In this case, the reason is that while grammatical systems may be difficult to terminologize or formalize without “absurd”-ity, children must be taught to understand their parents, society, each other.
They go on to say, “The understanding of the functions of language, of the many ways in which words serve us and mislead us, must be an essential aim of all true education” (261-262). The syntax of this sentence highlights the priorities of the authors. That is, they do not say “The essential aim of all true education is…” – instead they prioritize understanding as the subject (of this sentence but also of the book, of course). This is because their primary interest lies in meaning, as opposed to education (in this case). Precisely this type of syntactical decision/inversion is cited in a citation in the footnote that follows the aforementioned one. F. P. Ramsey asserts: “Now it seems to me as clear as anything can be in philosophy, that the two sentences ‘Socrates is wise’, ‘Wisdom is a characteristic of Socrates’ assert the same fact. . . . They are not, of course, the same sentence, but they have the same meaning, just as two sentences in two different languages can have the same meaning. Which sentence we use is a matter either of literary style or of the point of view from which we approach the fact. . . and has nothing to do with the logical nature of Socrates or wisdom, but is a matter entirely for grammarians” (97). The questionable word, appropriately, is “meaning” – here it is used to describe truth-functional equivalence. The order of things matters, of course, just not to the logical conclusion (in this case). Thus meaning in the context of Ramsey is not meaning in the context of, say, poetry. (That’s probably at least partly the point of this book, right?)
This reminds me of the discussion of sentences in the last class. Donna argued that “Running.” could be a sentence because it begins with a capital letter and ends with a period. I wasn’t sure I agreed. As usual, it depended upon which rules we chose to follow. OED:

6 a. A series of words in connected speech or writing, forming the grammatically complete expression of a single thought; in popular use often (= PERIOD n. 10), such a portion of a composition or utterance as extends from one full stop to another. In Grammar, the verbal expression of a proposition, question, command, or request, containing normally a subject and a predicate (though either of these may be omitted by ellipsis).
In grammatical use, though not in popular language, a ‘sentence’ may consist of a single word, as in L. algeo ‘I am cold’, where the subject (= I) is expressed by the ending of the verb. English grammarians usually recognize three classes: simple sentences, complex sentences (which contain one or more subordinate clauses), and compound sentences (which have more than one subject or predicate).

I thought this was a nice way to illustrate the pluralistic complications Ogden and Richards demonstrate/articulate.