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Ogden, C. K. (1889–1957) By Beard, David
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British writer, publisher and scholar Charles Kay Ogden was active in the field of linguistics and language. He is best known for The Meaning of Meaning (1923), a book co-authored with I. A. Richards, which would change semiotics permanently by offering a triadic model, consisting of symbol, referent and thought, which would replace Ferdinand de Saussure’s dyadic semiotics of signifier and signified. Ogden was active in the proliferation of English modernist literature and thought as the editor and publisher of several periodicals: Cambridge Magazine, which published notables like Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw as well as Ogden’s own work; Psyche: A Journal of General and Linguistic Psychology, which he founded in 1920; and The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method, which published works by Carl Jung, T. E. Hulme, Max Black, Jean Piaget, Bronisław Malinowski, G. E. Moore and others. Ogden edited Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions (1932), but his most significant contribution as an editor was to commission F. P. Ramsey (1903–1930) to translate into English Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a work that would alter the course of philosophy of language.