p A close examination of Richards’ aesthetic views will show that they are clustered around two main issues: the problem of communication in art and the problem of value. From the very start Richards the semanticist clearly states these two problems as the main problems of the theory of art. “The two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest,” he writes, “are an account of value and an account of communication" (3, 25).

p It is necessary to understand, the author insists, the full significance of the fact that we are social animals and are used to communication since earliest childhood. “The very structure of our minds is largely determined by the fact that man has been engaged in communicating for so many hundreds of thousands of years" (3, 25). Our experience (and experience for him is a spiritual state, ’a spiritual process) 29 intrinsically requires being communicated. The scientific theory of communication is of enormous significance for an understanding of art, for “the arts are the supreme form of the communicative activity" (3, 26). Many a difficult and obscure question of structures in art can be easily understood, in Richards’ view, if they are considered from the viewpoint of communication. The artist may not himself be aware that he is a communicator. As a rule he is concerned with something else. The real desire to communicate something has to be distinguished from the desire to create something with a hidden and disguised communicative potential.

p Thus we can see a desire in Richards to base art criticism on science and in particular on the scientific theory of communication. This desire was a sound and significant feature of his aesthetics. However he was not able to realize his intentions in full measure. A large share of the blame for this failure must be attributed to the neo-positivist philosophical premises of his views. It is only possible to make a true analysis of the communicative aspect of art in connection with its other important aspects, and above all with its epistemological problems. But it so happens that Richards’ neo-positivist position consists in a negation of the epistemological problems of art as “metaphysical”. Richards is guilty of scientism. As Marxist literature points out, the essence of scientism consists, first, in the reduction of scientific information to information received by means of exact, quantitative methods; secondly, in the absolutization of the role of scientific theories; thirdly, in declaring the scientific attitude to be the only legitimate attitude to the world; and fourthly, in the elimination of philosophy from the components of man’s world-view and the so-called metaphysical problems from the sphere of scientific issues. Richards, in accordance with the principles of scientism, is prepared to have recourse only to “experience”, only to the sciences with their exact scientific language, but not to philosophy, nor to epistemology. Richards’ scientism, as Black has correctly pointed out, took the form of faith in the universality of scientific method, resulting in unwarranted claims to be in possession of exact experimental techniques of studying art, and to the creation of 30 a science of criticism. Other western authors also expressed criticism of Richards’ ideas (Blackmur, James et al.).

p Richards turned to physiology (in particular, Pavlovian methods) and psychology to explain the role of communication in art, and in the process displayed behaviourist tendencies in his explanation of consciousness, communication in general and communication in art in particular. There is no doubt that he was influenced here by the ideas of Peirce and of pragmatists, by their behaviourist approach to the problem of meaning. Many authors discuss his behaviourist tendencies (Ransom, James). Black goes so far as to describe the conception advanced by the authors of The Meaning ot Meaning as a behaviourist theory. In our opinion, Richards’ behaviourism is more precisely evaluated by Morris, the founder of behaviourist semiotics. He pointed out that some of Richards’ ideas (such as his definition of meaning as delegated efficacy) develop in the direction of behaviourism, but this does not imply that Richards himself has followed a behavioural lead: he simply accorded an increasingly important role to “thought” in his account of sign, and showed greater scepticism as to explaining thought in behavioural terms. He showed an increasingly strong proclivity for mentalism. It is quite probable that Richards was prevented from becoming a consistent behaviourist by the fact that he was primarily concerned with art, which, in his own words, is characterized by an absence of actual behaviour. Consequently he was increasingly at pains to interpret reactions to a work of art as taking place in the sphere of imagination.

p This “narrow” orientation exclusively to the methods of physiology and psychology  [30•1  (primarily behaviourist) led to a 31 naturalistic conception of communication, already a feature of Peirce’s thought, and also characteristic of pragmatism and neo-positivism as a whole.

p One positive aspect of this conception of Richards’ was his anxiety to present communication as an entirely everyday affair which had been unjustifiably obfuscated by the transcendentalists. The latter had postulated as the objective basis of mutual understanding in the process of communication a mystical supra-individual communality of minds, a “transcendental minimum”, in Wilbur Urban’s expression. But what does the neo-positivist Richards propose in place of the “transcendental minimum"? People, he says, can understand one another’s utterances because they possess the same physical and mental structures (“the similarity of minds”), and also are dealing with a reality common to them all. One person experiences something and reacts to his environment in such a way that another person’s mind experiences exactly the same thing (3, 176-77).

The narrowness (and anti-historism) of such an anthropological, naturalistic approach was clearly apprehended and criticized by Hegel. Naturalism, Hegel points out, cannot cope with the singularity of the consciousness, it only describes the reason, remaining within the limits of the psychological attitude and the empirical manner. Hegel himself tried to overcome the narrowness of the empirical approach from the positions of objective idealistic dialectics. The deficiency both of the Hegelian and of the naturalistic explanation of the essence of man, of his consciousness and mutual understanding in the process of communication is seen by Marxism to consist in the impossibility of resolving these questions materialistically from a social and historical point of view. Only from these positions is it possible to explain how communal historical experience is recorded and communicated in art, when perceived in the form of individual experience, as an objective artistic value with a personal message. A scientific explanation of the particular nature of communication in art-avoiding the errors of hedonism and the theory of emotional infection-is only possible on condition the common object of artistic cognition-when it functions as 32 objective basis of communication-is understood as the communal practice of feelings, which, in a work of art, moves from a dynamic to an existential or objective form. Richards the naturalist was far from such a materialistic approach in his explanation of communication in art.