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, 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, 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.