[The critics] who have popularized the theory of the later Richards' conversion [to a chastened theorist] are literary critics who were dismayed by the positivism of the early works, and who applaud in the later works what they take to be a more congenial attitude toward truth and knowledge as constituents of poetry. The general contention of these interpreters is that in Coleridge on Imagination (1934) and his subsequent works, Richards repudiated his earlier positivist view of poetry as pseudo-statement and came to see poetry as a special kind of truth and knowledge, that "unique mode of knowing" so often celebrated—if not defined—by the later New Critics and others. (p. 50)

The passage that is most frequently cited … to support the claim that Richards reversed his position is [one] from The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) [in which he defines language as "no mere signalling system"]…. Here again, if the interpreters are correct, is the essence of the New Richards, emancipated at last from his positivist bondage. As Allen Tate puts it, "There is, in this passage,… an implicit repudiation of the leading doctrine of The Principles of Literary Criticism" [see excerpt above]…. Tate further interprets Richards' disparagement of "sensation" and "intuition" in the passage as an implicit repudiation of the behaviorist approach to language interpretation. [Richard Foster (see excerpt above)] also quotes the passage and echoes Tate's remarks.

But a look at the text reveals again that the repudiations are in the eye of the beholder. The passage comes as an extended critique of associationists, who reduce poetry to concrete imagery and visualizable mental pictures. The objection to the view of language as a "compromise for a language of intuition" is an objection not to the behavioristic interpretation of language but to the theory of T. E. Hulme, from whom the phrase is quoted. It is Hulme and his followers, not the earlier Richards nor the behaviorists, whom Richards is accusing of turning language into a mere "signalling system." The paragraph from which the passage is taken begins as a protest against the "blunder" of teachers who attempt to "make children visualize where visualization is a mere distraction and of no service." Richards is attacking only that tendency which … he had attacked many times in his books of ten years earlier—the associationist concept of the mind as a "storehouse" of images. This is what he is opposing when he asserts that language is not a "substitute for real experience."… And in Practical Criticism (1929) he repeats his protest against the "confusion" of attributing the effects of images to visualization. Again, by simply paying no attention to the context, the interpreters have transformed a familiar and characteristic protest against associationism into a sardonic commentary on the early works. (pp. 51-3)