The distinction Tarski suggested between syntax and...

The distinction Tarski suggested between syntax and semantics was later to play a definitive role in the foundations of (what would come to be called) model theory.

Even more broadly, it expressed the necessity, for a wide range of philosophers who followed, of supplementing the purely syntactical analysis of a language with a “world-directed” semantical analysis of the referential character of its terms and formulas.[^146] In addition to the dual analysis of language in terms of rules of syntax and rules of semantics, practitioners of analytic reflection on language would soon have a third, explicitly formulated category of sign behavior with which to reckon as well.

This was the category of “pragmatics” suggested by Charles Morris in 1938.[^147] Drawing on pragmatist philosophers such as James, Mead, Dewey and (especially) Pierce, Morris suggested that, in addition to the syntactic theory of the relations to signs to one another, and the semantic theory of their relations to their designata , pragmatics be added as a third explicit component of semiosis, or the total theory of sign function.

Pragmatics could then be defined thus: By ‘pragmatics’ is designated the science of the relation of signs to their…