Carnap and Grice on 'pragmatic' -- and what the inventor of it all thought about things: Morris -- via Sharpless

Seth Sharpless knows many (interesting things). Elsewhere, he pointed out how "Morris held that the debate between Quine and Carnap on the analytic-synthetic distinction could have been resolved had it been cast within the field of pragmatics."

Sharpless quotes from from Morris, "Signification and significance," pp. 46ff -- and publicly so. Morris writes:

"Another central issue in contemporary philosophy is whether a sharp
distinction can be made between analytic and synthetic sentences (or
"propositions"). In the present context this is the question of whether a
sharp distinction can be made between formative and lexical discourse. I
have suggested elsewhere that the distinction can be made only in terms of
pragmatic considerations--and not in terms o£ semantics or syntactics alone.
This seems to be implicitly involved in Carnap's introduction o£ "meaning
postulates" in his defense o£ the distinction o£ the analytic and the
synthetic. To decide whether the sentence "All crows are black" is analytic
or synthetic involves reference to the sign structure (and hence to the
dispositions to respond) of a specific interpreter (or a group of
interpreters). If the interpreter is disposed at a certain time to respond
to all denotata of the term 'crow' by the term 'black' (i.e., if he would
not call anything a crow unless it were black), then the sentence is
analytic at that time; otherwise it is not. Thp criterion is thus pragmatic
and involves the use of signs (i.e., the acceptance of a sign framework) by
a specific producer of the signs. 'Acceptance' is a basic term, in
pragmatics."

Sharpless comments: "Personally, I would not put it quite in this way, but I do believe that most of the force behind Quine's criticism of analyticity would vanish if the "language" under consideration were relativized to synchronic aspects of
idiolects, and if one allowed for reference to "meanings" (intensions,
senses) in the metalanguage, instead of, like Quine, nominalistically
banishing "meanings" to the "myth of the museum." It is hard to make the
case that any given sentence in English is analytic, but that may be because
English allows for a variety of proper interpretations, in some of which the
sentence would be analytic and in others not. Still, on an occasion when a
person interprets such a sentence (in conformity with the English lexical
rules), he may employ some specific criterion of identification (sense) of
the many allowed by English to identify denotata, and which criterion he
employs determines whether the sentence is analytic or not."

This is pretty much in keeping with Grice's pragmatist bent, too. I would think