Charles W. Morris
Charles William Morris ( * May 23, 1901 in Denver, Colorado; † January 15, 1979 in Gainesville, Florida) was an American semiotician and philosopher.
Life
Morris first made an engineering degree ( "Engineering " ) at Northwestern University in Chicago. He then earned a doctoral degree ( Ph.D.) at the University of Chicago with George Herbert Mead, who is considered the founder of social psychology and philosophy represented pragmatism. Morris first taught 1925-1931 at Rice University / Houston, Texas, then in Chicago from 1931 to 1958 and finally at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Morris chaired the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Morris published his lecture notes by George Herbert Mead and thus contributed significantly to these to make known.
In the 1930s, Morris supported the emigration of a number of German and Austrian philosophers in the United States. Among them were Rudolf Carnap, with whom he worked as a colleague in Chicago from 1936 to 1952 was. Morris was a member of the circle of unity Science ( Unitiy of Science) and together with Carnap and Otto Neurath co-editor of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. This he had close links with the Vienna Circle.
Morris founded his own direction of pragmatism. With his book Paths of Life: Preface to a World Religion 1942 he advocated a new form of religious belief. It was seen by C. Wright Mills as an escape attempt by the pragmatist philosophers against the acute social and political problems, as an expression of self-alienation of the intellectuals.
An important student of the semiotician Thomas Sebeok Morris was.
Teaching
Character concept
Morris took a pragmatic character concept by putting a code in place of a term or concept: " A sign is may best be characterized as follows: Z ( sign vehicle ) is a behavior I ( interpretant ) a sign of the object D ( designat ) provided I is. " one taking notice of D due to the occurrence of Z. He therefore also for the concept of semiosis ( sign process ): " According to this, in the semiosis something of something else indirectly, that is through the mediation of a third element, note A semiosis is thus an indirectly - note -and-take of the mediator.. are signs of support, the note names are interpretant, the stakeholders in this process are performers; that is taken from the note are Designate ".
Interpretant - Performer
Morris distinguished the interpretant of conceptual artists.
The concept of the interpretant go back to Peirce. In the Aristotelian tradition, the term interpretant or the thought was.
" Interpretant " is to be defined as " taking notice " as " effect, which is triggered in any recipient and through which the thing in question appears to him as a sign ." " The interpretant of a sign is the habit, by virtue of which the sign support the designation of certain types of objects or facts on types is attributed; ... "
This view is based on an explicit behaviorism, as well as equating or parallelization of his examples shows: (Example 1: A dog responds with a behavior ( I) ( scilicet: = interpretant ), which belongs to the hunting of squirrel on a particular sound (Z ) ... "; example 2: " a traveler turns on (I) to a specific area of the world ( D) when he receives a letter from a friend (Z ) " Morris himself does not see the behaviorism but. as the only possible interpretation of his character model to. behaviorism, however, speak for the associated overcome the " introspective (s) in school psychology ".
There are, despite the reference to the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce significant differences from Peirce. While Peirce founded his semiotics on general categories of perception and every idea conceived as a sign, Morris developed a behavioral perspective on the characters that followed as a scientific program a descriptive- empirical observation of the use of characters in a social context.
The concept of pragmatics
The pragmatic understanding of the drawing process leads to the inclusion of artists in the character model. The part of semiotics which deals with the relationship of the characters to support the artist is called by Morris pragmatics. This reference to the term " pragmatism ".
This involvement takes place in a broad sense: " Because, to most, if not all characters living organisms belonging as a performer, one can characterize the pragmatics sufficiently accurate with the words that it deals with the life-related aspects of semiosis ie that occur with all the psychological, biological and sociological phenomena in the process of drawing. "
The classification of semiotics in syntactic - semantic - pragmatic
From Morris comes the fundamental for the Semiotics distinction in syntactic, semantics and pragmatics.
It is noteworthy that here is called as the reference point of the pragmatics of the artist and not the interpretant.
The interpretation is done inconsistently:
Thus we read in the previous version: In his book, Foundations of the Theory of Signs he hit the triadic subdivision of a semiotic character in " interpretant " ( interpretation as a behavioral disposition ), " denotatum " (reference as an action item ) and " significatum " (also "sign vehicle ", meaning as a condition for the fulfillment of the character content) before.
In an afterword to the German translation is called as a reference point of pragmatics both the interpretant ( as " act of indirectly taking note " ) as well as the performer.
Works
- Foundations of the Theory of Signs ( 1938) ( German title: Fundamentals of the theory of signs, in:. Charles William Morris, Foundations of the theory of signs, aesthetics of sign theory, Frankfurt aM, Fischer (1988 ) - ISBN 3-596-27406-0 )
- Esthetics and the Theory of Signs (1939 ), in: aesthetics of sign theory, in: Charles William Morris, Foundations of the theory of signs, aesthetics of sign theory, Frankfurt aM, Fischer ( 1988). - ISBN 3-596-27406-0 )
- Signs, Language, and Behavior ( 1946)
- Signification and Significance (1964 )
- Writings on the General Theory of Signs (1971 )
- Mind, Self, and Society (1934 ), a collection of George Herbert Mead 's lectures.
- Scientific Empiricism (1938). In: International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol.1, No.1. Univ. of Chicago Press, Ill. 1938
- Paths of Life: Preface to a World Religion ( 1942)
- The Open Self (1948 )
- Varieties of Human Value ( 1956)
- The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (1970 )
- Six Theories of Mind
- Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, and Scientific Empiricism.