Pragmatics is defined by the American philosopher Charles Morris (Denver, Colorado, 1901–Gainesville, Florida, 1979) as the study of the pragmatical dimension of semiosis, i.e. of the relations of signs and interpreters. This dimension is one of three, the other two being the syntactical and the semantical. While special interest in the present article is not given to Morris’s interpretation of either Peirce or Mead, it is important to underline that Morris accepted Mead’s behaviorism (or pragmatism) and recognized many points in common between Mead’s approach to pragmatism and Peirce’s. Morris distinguished his own specific formulation of behaviorism, or behavioristics, from the physicalist thesis of the Unity of Science Movement preferring a biological framework, and beyond Mead his approach may be associated with Peircean pragmatism more than with James’s (though he recognized his debt to the latter in his article ‘William James Today’, 1942). Morris developed a pragmatic conception of meaning which led to his focus not only on signs but also on values. In Foundations of the Theory of Signs Morris divides semiotics into the three branches of syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, which correspond respectively to the three dimensions of semiosis, the syntactical, the semantical and the pragmatical. This trichotomy is fundamentally the result of two main influences: logico-empiricism and behaviorism on the one hand, and the pragmatic philosophy of Mead and Peirce, on the other (cf. Morris 1970), which explains why Morris had already understood the importance of not separating pragmatics from semiotics, nor therefore the pragmatical dimension of semiosis from the syntactical and semantical dimensions, as early as 1938. That Morris also focused on the semantical dimension of semiosis distinguished his own approach to behaviorism from that adopted by the structuralist Leonard Bloomfield (1933, 1974). In Foundations Morris establishes a correspondence between the three branches of semiotics and three philosophical orientations: these are ‘formalism’ or ‘symbolic logic’ which is made to relate to syntactics, empirism which is related to semantics, and pragmatism to pragmatics. Indeed, Morris, citing Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead, has ‘pragmatics’ derived specifically from ‘pragmatism’. However, the originator of American pragmatism was Peirce. The aspect Morris found most interesting about Peirce’s work (in spite of what he believed were his mentalistic limitations) was the latter’s emphasis on behavior. Peirce maintained that to determine the meaning of a sign we must identify the habits of behavior it produces, which in fact resounds in Morris’s own orientation. In Morris’s view, Peirce had the merit of rejecting old Cartesian mentalism and replacing it with the concept of habits of behavior and, therefore, of directing semiotics toward a more adequate account of sign-processes. Morris’s book of 1970, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy, is interesting for at least two reasons: firstly, it presents a survey of the basic ideas informing the development of pragmatism in the U. S. A. and does so in historical perspective, focusing primarily on the thoughts of four American philosophers who form the original nucleus and propelling force of this movement — Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead; secondly, by implication this study presents an overview, contextualization and interpretive key for a retrospective reading of the development of Morris’s own work as a semiotician and philosopher relating to this particular movement. Morris defined pragmatics as the study of the relations of sign vehicles to interpreters or more simply as “the relations of signs to their users” (1938c). Morris’s conception of pragmatics concerns both verbal and nonverbal signs. In line with his plan to theorize the connection between values and the sign dimension of behavior, Morris qualified signification as designative, prescriptive, and appraisive signification, respectively exemplified with the words ‘black’, ‘ought’, and ‘good’. The term ‘value’ is used in different contexts to signify different aspects of value situations, that is, situations involving preferential behavior. Morris discusses three usages which he considered as basic. Moreover, he identified three dimensions of value. His interest in the relation of signs to values is closely connected with pragmatics as the science of the study of the relation of signs to their interpreters. Morris’s theoretical horizon is far more complex and articulate than reported in this paper, which simply traced its outlines. However, what it does wish to underline is the fact that his studies on the relation of signs and values identify correspondences among notions established in the context of sign theory, action analysis (Mead) and value theory.