semiosis

Semiosis is the process by which a sign produces an interpretant, which, being itself a sign, produces a further interpretant, and so on. It is the dynamic, iterative process through which meaning is generated, propagated, and transformed.

Peirce treated semiosis as the fundamental operation of sign systems. A sign does not “have” a meaning in a static sense — it generates meaning through the process of being interpreted. This generation is open-ended: each interpretant is a new sign, capable of entering into further sign relations. The chain of semiosis is constrained by habit, context, and purpose, but it has no necessary termination point [@short_PeirceTheorySigns_2007].

Umberto Eco coined the phrase “unlimited semiosis” to emphasize that interpretation is never final — every sign points to further signs, every definition uses terms that themselves require definition. This is not a deficiency of sign systems but their constitutive character [@eco_TheorySemiotics_1976].

Related terms

• sign — the entity that participates in semiosis
• interpretant — the meaning produced at each step of semiosis
• representamen — the sign vehicle that initiates a sign relation

Source: Short, T. L. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Cambridge University Press, 2007. See also Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press, 1976.