Charles William Morris (May 23, 1901 – January 15, 1979) was an American philosopher and semiotician.
Early life and education
A son of Charles William and Laura (Campbell) Morris, Charles William Morris was born on May 23, 1901, in Denver, Colorado.
Morris briefly attended the University of Wisconsin, and later studied engineering and psychology at Northwestern University, where he graduated with a B.S. in 1922. That same year, he entered the University of Chicago where he became a doctoral student in philosophy under the direction of George Herbert Mead. Morris completed his dissertation on a symbolic theory of mind and received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1925.
Career
After his graduation, Morris turned to teaching, first at Rice University, and later at the University of Chicago. In 1958 he became Research Professor at the University of Florida. His students included semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok. In 1937 Morris presided over the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, and was Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Morris was an instructor of philosophy for six years from 1925 to 1931 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. After leaving Rice, he was associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1931 to 1947. Morris became a lecturing professor at Chicago in 1948, occupying the position until 1958 when he received an offer for a special appointment as a Research Professor at the University of Florida, where he remained until his death.
During his time at Rice University, Morris wrote and defended his philosophical perspective known as neo-pragmatism. He also worked on and published Six Theories of Mind. At the end of his term at Rice, Morris returned to the University of Chicago. In the early 1930s, the University of Chicago's philosophy department was unstable, but in the midst of change and difficult economic times, Morris felt that philosophy would serve as a torch that would light the way to saving world civilization. Morris's union of these three philosophical perspectives eventuated in his claim that symbols have three types of relations:
- to objects,
- to persons, and
- to other symbols.
He later called these relations "semantics", "pragmatics", and "syntactics". 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 (1946). 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.