Charles W. Morris - Morris and Semiotics

Morris and Semiotics

Morris's development of a behavioral theory of signs (semiotics) is partly due to his desire to unify logical positivism with behavioral empiricism and pragmatism. Morris's union of these three philosophical perspectives eventuated in his claim that symbols have three types of relations:

1. to objects,
2. to persons, and
3. to other symbols.

He later called these relations "semantics", "pragmatics", and "syntactics". Viewing semiotics as a way to bridge philosophical outlooks, Morris grounded his sign theory in Mead's social behaviorism. In fact, Morris's interpretation of an interpretant, a term used in the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, has been understood to be strictly psychological. Morris's system of signs emphasizes the role of stimulus and response in the orientation, manipulation, and consummation phases of action. His mature semiotic theory is traced out in Signs, Language, and Behavior. Morris's semiotic is concerned with explaining the tri-relation between syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics in a dyadic way, which is very different from the semiotics of C.S. Peirce. This caused some to argue that Morris misinterpreted Peirce by converting the interpretant into a logically existent thing.