A brief look at simple parallels between Locke and Richards & Ogden

     To be honest I found The Meaning of Meaning to be quite a bit more confusing than Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding but I will try to parse out the similarities and differences I found. Richards and Ogden's argument does not seem all that dissimilar to Locke. Richard and Ogden focus much more on Symbol, Definition, and Referent whereas Locke focuses on words and their signification. At some level these two approaches are the same in that the symbol (or word) refers to the referent in some circuitous way. Richards and Ogden use "Napoleon" as an example and the route to that word's meaning is "word -- historian -- contemporary -- record -- eyewitness -- referent (Napoleon)" (Ogden 1275). This is very similar to the way that Locke talks about complex modes where a person's history greatly effects what a word means to each individual person. The difference is pretty significant though. In their trace of "Napoleon," Richards and Ogden seem to suggest that instead of an individual history working to create the connection between a symbol and its referent it is actually a shared history that makes that connection. So instead of arguing that words are and communication are confused because of the people using them they are confusing in-and-of-themselves.
   I'm not entirely sure what else to say about this The Meaning of Meaning because I found it so confusing.