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Charles W. Morris Quotes
d. 1979 United States
Charles William Morris (May 23, 1901 – January 15, 1979) was an American semiotician and philosopher, especially known for his 1938 book, entitled Foundations of the Theory of Signs.
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A language in the full semiotical sense of the term is any intersubjective set of sign vehicles whose usage is determined by syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical rules.
p. 48; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962)
The Encyclopedia presents a contemporary version of the ancient encyclopedic ideal of Aristotle, the Scholastics, Leibniz, the Encyclopedists, and Comte.
Semiotics... is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary objects in so far (and only in so far) as they participate in semiosis.
The full characterization of a language may now be given: A language in the full semiotic sense of the term is any intersubjective set of sign vehicles whose usage is determined by syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical rules.
Empirical problems of a nonlinguistic sort are not solved by linguistic considerations, but it is important that the two kinds of problems not be confused and that nonlinguistic problems be expressed in such a form as aids their empirical solution.
There are, then, syntactical problems in the fields of perceptual signs, aesthetic signs, the practical use of signs, and general linguistics which have not been treated within the framework of what today is regarded as logical syntax and yet which form part of syntactics as this is here conceived.
In Foundations of the Theory of Signs (p. 6), the three terms in question were defined follows: pragmatics as the study of "the relation of signs to interpreters", semantics as the study of "the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable", syntactics as the study of "the formal relations of signs to one another."
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