Morris, Carnap, and Grice on 'pragmatic'

It's interesting that S C Levinson, the author of _Presumptive Meanings: Generalised Conversational Implicature_ quotes Morris in his previous book, _Pragmatics_, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

Levinson quotes 4 books by MORRIS.

1. FOUNDATIONS of the Theory of Signs
In Morris et al, Int. Encyc. etc.
Repr in Morris WRITINGS

2. SIGNS, LANGUAGE, & BEHAVIOUR
Prentice Hall.

3. SIGNIFICATION & SIGNIFICANCE
MIT

4. WRITINGS ON THE GENERAL THEORY
OF SIGNS. Mouton.

and discussed the author on pp.1-5 and 10

"The modern usage of "pragmatics" is attributable to MORRIS, who was
concerned to outline (after LOCKE) the general shame of SEMIOTIC". Morris
defined pragmatics as "the study of the Relation of Signs to Intepreters"
(MORRIS, Foundations, p.6). Morris writes: "It is a sufficiently accurate
characterisation of pragmatics to say that it deals with the BIOTIC aspect
of SEMIOSIS, that is, with all the PSYCHOLOGICAL, BIOLOGICAL, and
SOCIOLOGICAL phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs" (Morris,
Foundations, p.108).

Levinson then goes on to discuss Carnap (In Presumptive Meanings, Levinson shows he is aware of the seminal Carnap's and Bar-Hillel's idea of semantic information and other notions of Carnapian origin such as intensional isomorphism. And then why wouldn't he?)

Levinson writes:

"After an initial Morrisian usage (Carnap,
Foundations of Logic & Mathematics, in Morris et al, p.2), Carnap adopted a
different version of the Morrisian trichotomy. Unfortunately, Carnap's use
of "pragmatics" was confused by his adoption of Morris's further
distinction between _pure_ and _descriptive_ pragmatics, and he came to
equate pragmatics with descriptive semiotics in general. But Carnap was not
even consistent here: he also held that there was room for a pure pragmatic=
s!"

Levinson notes:

"In Morris's usage, there can be found a systematic
three-way ambiguity about "pragmatics":
First, The word was applied not only to BRANCHES of inquiry but also to
features of the object language.

Second, the term was used to refer to deictic expressions only, since the
reference to users was essential in this case.
Third, it was thought that only pragmatics studied context!

Levinson summarises:

"A number of distinct usages of the term "pragmatics"
have sprong from Morris's original division of semiotics: the study of the
huge range of psychological and sociological phenomena involved in sign
systems in general or in language in particular, or the study of certain
abstract concepts that make reference to agents (one of Carnap's usages),
or the study of deixis, or finally, the recent use among Griceans, the
study of non-truth conditional aspects of meaning (i.e. MEANING MINUS
Truth-Conditions).

FROM MORRIS TO GRICE, via CARNAP. Grice never used 'pragmatics' with a final 's', though -- JUST 'pragmatic' (pragmatic vs. logical inference, in WoW:RE -- he was a dissident and loved to see his work as 'semantics' (title of Section II of WoW: Only when mixed with 'metaphysics' ("Metaphysics and Semantics", "Semantics and Metaphysics").

Bach considers the following chronology of pragmatics, which was brought to
my attention by Larry Tapper. In http://online.sfsu.edu/~kbach/semprag.html
K Bach quotes:A Chronology of Formulations, from Morris to the Standard
Griceans...:

"Semantics deals with the relation of signs to … objects which they may or
do denote. Pragmatics concerns the relation of signs to their interpreters."
Morris, p. 35.


"Syntax studies sentences, semantics studies propositions. Pragmatics is the
study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed.
There are two major types of problems to be solved within pragmatics:
first, to define interesting types of speech acts and speech products;
second, to characterize the features of the speech context which help
determine which proposition is expressed by a given sentence. … It is a
semantic problem to specify the rules for matching up sentences of a
natural language with the propositions that they express. In most cases,
however, the rules will not match sentences directly with propositions, but
will match sentences with propositions relative to features of the context
in which the sentence is used. These contextual features are part of the
subject matter of pragmatics."
Stalnaker, p. 383. I met him at Yale. He is my favourite MIT Griceian.

"I draw the theoretical line between semantic interpretation and pragmatic
interpretation by taking the semantic component to properly represent only
those aspects of the meaning of the sentence that an ideal speaker-hearer
of the language would know in an anonymous letter situation, … [where the=
re is] no clue whatever about the motive, circumstances of transmission, or
any other factor relevant to understanding the sentence on the basis of its
context of utterance.
Katz, p. 14.- Katz draws intensely from Griceaianism.


"PRAGMATICS = MEANING - TRUTH CONDITIONS (p. 2)
What we need in addition is some function that tells us about the meaning
of utterances. … The domain of this pragmatic function is the set of
utterances, which are pairs of sentences and contexts, so that for each
utterance, our function will return as a value a new context-the context as
changed by the sentence uttered … . And we can treat the meaning of the
utterance as the difference between the original context and the context
arrived at by utterance the sentence. [This applies to only] a restricted
subset of pragmatic aspects of meaning."
Gazdar, p. 4. -- sometime PhD student under Palmer at Reading.

"Semantics provides a complete account of sentence meaning for the language,
[by] recursively specifying the truth conditions of the sentences of the
language. … Pragmatics provides an account of how sentences are used in
utterances to convey information in context."
Ruth M. Kempson, p. 139 -- an uniguist living in London ("School of Parsimony").


"Pragmatics is the study of language which focuses attention on the users
and the context of language use rather than on reference, truth, or grammar."
Fotion, the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 709


"Pragmatics studies the use of language in context, and the
context-dependence of various aspects of linguistic interpretation. … [Its
branches include the theory of how] one and the same sentence can express
different meanings or propositions from context to context, owing to
ambiguity or indexicality or both, … speech act theory, and the theory of
conversational implicature."
Lycan, the Cambridge Dict. of Philosophy, p. 588.


"The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is, roughly, the
distinction between the significance conventionally or literally attached
to words, and thence to whole sentences, and the further significance that
can be worked out, by more general principles, using contextual information.
Davies, the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, p.124.

ENTER GRICE -- or rather its rationale. Now, how did Grice get this via Morris (if at all) is probably via STEVENSON, ETHICS & LANGUAGE which is probably related to Morris.

Thus Grice writes in STUDIES IN THE WAY OF WORDS:

"I include under the
head of "mean" any usages of "mean" foudn in sentences of the pattern".

1. U means something by x.

"This is overrigid but it will serve as an indication" (p.215). STUDIES
does not index "pragmatics", but there's this interesting use on p.375: "I
canvassed the idea taht the alleged divergence betwween modernists' logic
and vulgar logical connectives might be represented as being a matter not
of LOGICAL but of pragmatic import"... He had previously written, that when
Strawson wrote _Logic_, Grice was "devoting much attention to what might be
loosely called the distinction between LOGICAL AND PRAGMATIC INFERENCES...
to elucidate problems in the philosophy of perception ("seem" vs "is") etc.
Lots of problems seemd to me to rest on A BLURRING OF THE LOGICAL-PRAGMATIC
DISTINCTION.

Grice cites Stevenson in the previous quote about Mr Wilson... But in
general, it is wiser to see with LR Horn, that if an Oxford can use
"semantics" instead of "pragmatics", he will...
(Horn, Why Gricean Inference is Gricean, in _The Legacy of Grice_, in K
Hall, et al).

But Grice just stuck with 'logical' vs. pragmatic inference (WoW:RE) which is vague in that his point is that to make sense of an inference as 'pragmatic' we have to extend, slightly, the point of 'logical'. Etc.

References
Davies, M.
The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 90-139.
Fotion, N.
Pragmatics. In T. Honderich (ed.): The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 709.
Gazdar, G.
Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form. London: Academic
Press.
Grice, HP.
Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Katz, J.
Propositional Structure and Illocutionary Force. New York: Crowell.
Kempson, R.
Grammar and conversational principles. In Newmeyer, F. (ed.):
Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, Vol. II. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 139-163.
Lycan, W.
Philosophy of language. In R. Audi (ed.): The Cambridge Dictionary of
Philosophy. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, pp. 586-589.
Morris, C.W Foundations of the theory of signs. In Writings on the Theory
of Signs. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 17-74.
Stalnaker, R.
Pragmatics. In G. Harman and D. Davidson (eds.): Semantics of Natural
Language. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 380-397.