Editing Charles W. Morris (section)

===Semiotics===
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Morris's development of a behavioral theory of signs—i.e., [[semiotics]]—is partly due to his desire to unify  [[logical positivism]] with [[behavioral empiricism]] and [[pragmatism]].<ref name="Posner">Posner, Roland. “Charles Morris and the Behavioral Foundations of Semiotics.” Classics of Semiotics. Ed. Krampen. Plemun Press. New York: 1987. pp. 25.</ref> 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".<ref name="Posner" /> 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.<ref name="Dewey">Dewey, John. “Peirce's Theory of Linguistic Signs, Thought, and Meaning.” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Feb. 14, 1946), pp.85-95.</ref> 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).<ref name="Morris">Morris, Charles W.: Signs, Language and Behavior. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1946. Reprinted, New York: George Braziller, 1955. Reprinted in Charles Morris, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 73–397.</ref> 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.<ref name="Dewey" />