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p Basing himself on the analysis of Peirce, Richards and Ogden, Gatschenberg, Buhler and others, Morris systematized semiotics as a science, creating a language in which it was possible to talk about signs, and pointed out the basic directions in which this science should be developed. Morris identified the three main aspects of semiotics (semantics, syntactics and pragmatics); gave a detailed classification of the modes (or “dimensions”) of signification (designative-characterizing, appraisive-evaluating, prescriptive-prescribing, formative-forming), the ways of using signs (informing, evaluative, stimulating, systematizing), types of discourse (scientific, technological, political, propagandistic and others), pointed out the possible ways of measuring them quantitatively; developed the views expressed by Peirce of the difference between true, adequate and reliable uses of signs; illuminated a number of problems about the place and role of signs in the life of the individual and society (signs and mental disorders, the role of signs in social control etc.); and provided a short sketch of the history of semiotics.

p Morris himself saw one of his primary tasks in semiotics to be its elaboration on the basis of behaviourist psychology. In contrast to radical behaviourism (Watson, Thorndike, 203 Lachley, Weiss, Ranter) and following Tolman, Morris does not exclude the mind, does not hold that such “mentalistic” terms as “ideas”, “thoughts”, “mind”, “consciousness” are meaningless, and that the data of self-observation are without value etc. He merely believes that such behaviourist terms as “organism”, “stimulus”, “responce-sequence” etc. are more suitable, more precise for scientific progress (5, 28).

p The functioning of any particular phenomenon as a sign is signalled by the emergence of an idea in the mind of the perceiver of the sign. But, asks Morris, what is the more reliable criterion of the existence of an idea, a criterion which can be tested by other people: behaviour or recounted selfobservation? He answers: of course, behaviour. That is why, he argues, it makes sense to express the theory of signs in behavioural terms, and not those of the psychology of consciousness.

p The endeavour first of Tolman, and then of Morris, to give a functional definition of the concepts of psychology of consciousness through objective data about behaviour, is of indisputable interest. This approach acquires particular significance in connection with the achievements of cybernetics, which is in fact characterized by its study of the external functions of systems, of their behaviour, and a lack of concern for the inner structures which form the basis of these systems. The validity of this approach as one of the fundamental stages in the study of inner structures is particularly justified, as W. Ashby has emphasized, with respect to complex dynamic systems. The human mind has an uncontested place amongst such systems. The functional approach makes possible the “mathematicization” of a particular area of knowledge and is widely applicable in modern science.  [203•1 

p However, neither Tolman nor Morris succeeded in carrying out their design. Instead of reaching cognition of the inner through the outer, of the structure of the mind as one of the factors determining behaviour, through behaviour itself, they 204 mechanically equated the outer to the inner, the mind to behaviour. When he advanced actions and reactions as a criterion of signs Morris came up against difficulties in the explanation of the meaning of signs which do not directly stimulate any outer behaviour. Amongst such signs are the majority of lingual symbols expressing complex phenomena in the aesthetic, legal, scientific etc. spheres. We may recall that Richards had pointed out that art was precisely characterized by an absence of outer behaviour. To circumvent this difficulty Morris claims in Signs, Language and Behavior that the sign does not function as a sign when it provokes a reaction but when it provokes a disposition to respond in certain circumstances. He calls the disposition to respond the interpretant. Morris’ interpretant corresponds to Pirce’s interpretant when understood as a “habit” (a readiness to act in a particular way etc.), and Richards’ “attitude”. In his interpretation of “interpretant” Morris basically operates with those working concepts used by modern behaviourism and neuro-cybernetics. The interpretant is understood as a neural physiological process. It can also be explained in probability terms as the probability of giving a certain response in certain conditions to a sign, or an intermediary variable postulated for certain purposes and capable of being controlled by direct empirical proof (8, 3).

p The behaviourist criterion of signs advanced by Morris-i.e. the ability of some stimulus or other to provoke a disposition to respond is vulnerable to criticism in a number of respects, in particular in its application to art. First of all, by regarding “disposition” as a cerebral phenomenon he is rejecting behaviour as a criterion (19). With application to art this means that it is not man’s behaviour under the influence of art which serves as the criterion of the sign nature of a work of art but the neural physiological process in his brain. Even if we admit the possibility of an empirical revelation of these processes, we are forced to reject (as M. Black notes with regard to Richards’ “attitude”) the effectiveness of the “ criterion of disposition" from a practical point of view.

p Let us examine the case where the conditions are created in which “disposition” is realized in behaviour. The 205 denotatum of the sign is the name given to whatever makes possible the completion of the sequence of responses to which the interpreter is susceptible as a result of the sign. Denotata are actually existing objects.  [205•1  Even if we allow that an observed response, behaviour with regard to an object (denotatum) enables us to explain this response-disposition which the sign has provoked we still have to explain those instances where it is in principle impossible to create the necessary conditions for the realization of such behaviour. We find the latter, for example, when past events are the denotata. All past events which are taken as the object of depiction in art are such denotata. A sequence of responses to them is never completed and we therefore never find out which “dispositions” were provoked in us by given works of art, nor, consequently, do we find out their significance or the meaning of the signs. Such a position can only be described as agnosticism with regard to fathoming the meaning of such works of art. It is no accident that Morris should display agnosticism with regard to signs of past events. The critics of pragmatism have long been pointing out that the tendency to deny the meaningfulness of terms or statements about past events, or of events as distinct from “actions”, or of both together, is extremely marked both in Peirce and in the subsequent development of pragmatism.

p It is impossible to define “disposition” with regard not only to past phenomena, but to any which are unobservable, whether these are present, future or imaginary events and people. If we bear in mind the significant role played in art by the reproduction of such events it will become apparent that it is in practice simply impossible to test a disposition to respond provoked by art through the completion of a sequence of responses when directly observing the denotatum of the sign. In reply to these objections Morris explains in his work Signification and Significance that in art the sign should have a “meaning”, but does not necessarily have to have a 206 denotatum. But he fails to explain how in this case we are to establish which response-disposition is provoked by a work of art which does not have a denotatum.

p We might also mention a number of other serious objections to Morris’ behaviourist semiotics (25), in particular to its application to art, religion, law, philosophy etc. All this together leads to the conclusion that Morris’ “promise” to provide a more “objective” criterion of the iconicity of signs than those given with the help of the categories “mind”, “idea”, “concept” etc. remained unfulfilled. Morris’ behaviourist semiotics had come to a dead-end. This statement holds true to an even greater extent for the interpretation of art from the positions of behaviourist semiotics.

p The behaviourist method of analysis is extremely popular in the west, in particular in the USA. However, despite its popularity, many western scholars are becoming increasingly critical of it. For example, “social behaviourism" as a conception of behaviour is characterized by many western sociologists (Talcott Parsons, Pitirim Sorokin et al.) as theoretically void and superficial. Many western aestheticians are similarly reaching extremely pessimistic conclusions about the scientific value of behaviourism for the analysis of art. Thus, Susanne Langer professes precisely this view. In her book Feeling and Form she notes that over at least the last fifty years a marked tendency can be observed to enclose all philosophical questions within the confines of “behaviourism and pragmatism”, and asserts that there “they find neither development nor solution".

p It is clearly no accident that when Morris abandons his primary objective-to create a language of semiotics-and starts to apply semiotics in practice to the phenomena of art he “forgets” about the behaviourist method. His attempts to apply this method are restricted to statements of the most general character about the connection between art and behaviour, the influence of the former on the latter etc. Morris’ views on art (just as those on science, philosophy etc.) become inane if we interpret the terms he uses—“sign”, “ representation”, “language”-according to the behaviourist definitions which he gives these terms in his semiotics. Morris does not do 207 this. “We are certainly not at present able,” he writes in his Signs, Language and Behavior, “to analyze in precise behavioral terms the most complex phenomena of esthetic, religious, political, or mathematical signs, or even the common language of our daily existence" (5, 11). This admission of Morris’ contains, in addition to the correct view that a functional analysis of the mind, of semiotics and of art, is difficult and insufficiently elaborated, evidence that Morris is blind to one of the primary reasons for his failures-the methodologically insubstantial philosophical premises of his analysis.

p Like many contemporary behaviourists and neuro-cyberneticians, Morris takes the position of the mechanistic interpretation of the mind: only its physiological side is recognized, and the mind as something “ideal” is rejected, or at least is not accorded a proper place in explaining how human behaviour, including sign behaviour, is regulated. Morris argues that such terms as “idea”, “thought”, “mind”, although they are not meaningless, may all without exception be covered by behaviourist semiotics (5, 30). This view leads to epiphenomenalism, to the view of the mind as an ancillary phenomenon (epiphenomenon), without any real influence on man’s behaviour.

p The rejection of the ideal side of the mind in its function of reflecting reality led Morris to irresoluble contradictions and confusion in the interpretation of one of the central concepts of semiotics-the “meaning” of the sign. The great majority of his reviewers, irrespective of their own philosophical persuasion, remark on this fact (14; 16; 18; 29). It is instructive to see how Morris himself reacted to this criticism, and which position he takes in his latest work Signification and Significance. As before he refuses to use the term “ meaning”, regarding it as infelicitous, and substitutes two terms for it: “interpretant” and “signification”. His critics (J. Wild et al.) correctly noted that if we are to call the “meaning” of a sign the “interpretant”, the individual mental reaction to a sign, then “meaning” inevitably acquires a subjective character, which is contradictory to its universal nature. In reply to his critics Morris stated that the interpretant is not necessarily subjective. To support his argument he 208 advances the concept of the interpretant as “a disposition to react in a certain way because of the sign" (8, 3). But this argument does not exonerate him from the charge of subjectivism. However high the probability of a reaction, however typical it is, it still remains the reaction of an individual and therefore contains an element of subjectivism and is not “ universal".

p Let us examine the second component of “meaning”, designated with the term “signification”. Morris explains that these are not “essences” in any objective (Platonic!) sense. These are certain describable aspects of the complex behavioural process in the natural world. To avoid charges of nominalism Morris points out that these are not only actual things, designated by the term “denotatum”. There is a lot of sound sense in this conception of “meaning”: the rejection of Platonism, of nominalism, the interpretation of “meaning” as a relation functionally connected with the social process of semiosis (or the sign situation). But this conception lacks a primary element: the interpretation of “meaning” as an ideal reflection of reality. This prevents Morris, and, incidentally, all the adherents of the pragmatic conception of language (including Dewey), from understanding the cognitive function of signs, and without such understanding the regulative function is also left without substantiation. In the view of the Soviet scholar L. A. Abramyan “the concepts of sign and significance, as they are presented by Morris, are in essence unscientific abstractions".  [208•1 

p The American semioticist’s behaviourist mishaps with “meaning” are also extremely characteristic of semantic idealist and mechanistic philosophy as a whole, and of the 209 semantic (of neo-positivist persuasion) version of pragmatism in particular, whose positions were taken by Dewey, Mead and their pupil and successor Morris.

p The philosophical foundations of Morris’ aesthetics are also in full harmony with the pragmatic-positivist interpretation of semiotics and the “meaning” of signs. For the general theoretical basis of his semiotic analysis Morris took pragmatic aesthetics. By his own admission he does not claim to have come up with an original aesthetic theory. In his article “Aesthetics and the Theory of Signs" he points out that his views on art correspond in all essential respects to the views expressed by Dewey in his work Art as Experience. In addition to Dewey he also mentions the pragmatists G. Mead (The Philosophy oi the Act-1938) and S. Pepper (Aesthetic Quality -1937). Morris saw his task to be the translation of the pragmatic theory of art into the language of semiotics (2, 131).

p Morris’ rejection of the reflective, epistemological aspect of the “meaning” of the sign from his semiotics finds expression in the fundamental thesis of pragmatic aesthetics of the “instrumental” character of art-a thesis, whose development led the pragmatists and Morris to the point where they no longer viewed art as cognition, the artistic reflection of reality. Morris fails to see and to analyse the ideal, reflective side of the “meanings” of works of art, when viewed as signs; It is precisely this failing that leads him to his crudely mechanistic, simplistic resolution of the problem of the connection between art and human behaviour. Our general evaluation of Morris’ semiotics given above fully applies to the semiotic theory of art as well. Since Morris did not provide a correct interpretation of the “meaning” of the signs of art he can hardly be considered the founder of the scientific semiotic theory of art.

It would be quite wrong to form the conclusion from all that has been said that Morris’ writings contain nothing but error and confusion. We have already stated that “in practice”, when applying semiotics to the analysis of art, Morris practically never resorts to his “behaviourist” interpretations, and he adduces a wealth of material, observations and conclusions reached by semiotics. His writings contain much of 210 interest in the way he approaches his subject, and numerous accurate observations and conclusions which have enriched the “sign complex" of the semiotic theory of art. The scientific discussion around a number of premises of Morris’ semiotic theory of art is of undoubted value for the development of this theory. Let us now proceed to an analysis of these premises.