Background
Morris, Charles William was born on May 23, 1901 in Denver, Colorado, United States.
Philosopher of language: empiricist: semiotician
Morris, Charles William was born on May 23, 1901 in Denver, Colorado, United States.
University of Wisconsin at Madison, Northwestern University and University of Chicago.
1925-1930, Instructor in Philosophy, Rice University, Houston: 1931-1958, Associate Professor, Lecturer then Research Professor. University of Chicago. 1958-1979. Research Professor in Philosophy, then Professor Emeritus, University of Florida.
A man of wide interests and sympathies, and of enormous industry, Charles Morris is known first and foremost as a semiotician. Semiotic was to be the scientific study of signbehaviour and signs of all types: ‘whether in animals or men, whether normal or pathological, whether linguistic or nonlinguistic. whether personal or social’. The interdisciplinary nature of the subject he both stressed and lauded. Semiotic was famously divided by Morris into the three main branches of syntactics, semantics and pragmatics, where syntactics is the study of the relations of signs to one another, semantics the study of the relations of signs to their significata. and pragmatics the study of the relations of signs to their users and uses. In this respect, though in few others. Morris’s terminology has been widely adopted. Following his teacher Mead, Morris adopted a behaviourist orientation, while maintaining that semiotic was in principle detachable from this orientation. He belonged to the American pragmatist tradition but had made a tour of European centres of philosophy in the early 1930s; he has been aptly described as a liaison officer between pragmatism and logical positivism. Along with Carnap he served as subeditor of the Encyclopedia of Unified Science, of which Neurath was editor-in-chief. Morris’s interests encompassed education, Zen Buddhism and W. H. Sheldon’s studies of human types. In education, knowledge of sign phenomena helped to immunize against exploitation and manipulation by signs.