Controversies and Misunderstandings about Meaning: On the reception of Odgen and Richards' book, "The Meaning of Meaning"

International audienceThe Meaning of Meaning is an influential book published by Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957) and Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979) (from now on O&R) in January 1923. It describes a theory of meaning, more specifically trying to determine the nature of meaning and why misunderstandings frequently occur between people. Even if the book is now considered as “dated” , it has been intensively read, especially in the English speaking world where it has been widely used as a textbook in semantics; the book is still much cited and raises problems which are wide open, like the notion of meaning itself, the relationships between words and objects, and communication problems. Therefore, it seems worth exploring why this book is still influential nowadays, as can be seen in various fields from computational linguistics to communication studies, via the Semantic Web