If structuralism narrows the scope of representation, general semiotics expands it.
Where earlier accounts restricted signs to language or symbolic systems, semiotics generalised treats signification as a pervasive feature of reality. Gestures, images, practices, institutions, and even natural phenomena are redescribed as signs. Meaning is no longer a special property of language; it is the interpretability of anything whatsoever.
This expansion appears, at first, to complete the relational turn begun by structuralism. But in doing so, it reinstalls representational dependence at a deeper level.
When Everything Is a Sign
Generalisation removes the boundary between linguistic and non-linguistic meaning. Anything that can be taken as meaningful is taken as a sign.
This has an attractive consequence: meaning is no longer confined to inner states or symbolic codes. It is distributed across practices, artefacts, and environments.
Yet the price of this move is subtle. If everything is a sign, then meaning everywhere requires interpretation. And interpretation, in turn, presupposes something that is being interpreted.
Representation returns, now unbounded.
Interpretation as Explanatory Centre
In semiotics generalised, explanation shifts toward interpretation.
Meaning arises when something is taken as standing for something else by an interpreter. The sign–object relation is mediated by interpretive activity, often iterated indefinitely.
This framing resolves the problem of privacy introduced by mentalism: meaning is no longer locked inside minds. But it does so by universalising the representational schema.
Every meaningful phenomenon now owes an account of:
what it stands for,
how it is interpreted,
why this interpretation rather than another is warranted.
Teleology and causation re-enter as questions about interpretive aims and processes.
Unlimited Semiosis and Explanatory Regress
One response to the instability of interpretation is to embrace it.
Meaning is said to arise through an open-ended chain of signs interpreting signs. There is no final referent, only further interpretation.
While this avoids naive reference, it does not escape representation. It multiplies it.
Explanation now risks regress. Each sign requires another sign to interpret it. Each interpretation calls for another account of how and why it occurred.
Causation proliferates; teleology diffuses rather than disappears.
The Return of Aboutness
Despite its relational rhetoric, semiotics generalised often restores aboutness as a default.
Signs are still about something, even if that something is another sign. Meaning remains a matter of standing-for, only now within a self-referential network.
The system becomes dynamic, but the ontology remains representational.
What changes is not what meaning is, but how far representation extends.
Why This Move Is Appealing
Generalisation promises inclusivity. It appears to avoid reductionism by allowing many forms of meaning to coexist.
It also appears to sidestep mentalism by locating meaning in practices of interpretation rather than inner content.
But these gains are achieved without abandoning the core assumption that meaning consists in representation.
The sign remains the explanatory unit. Interpretation remains the explanatory process. Standing-for remains the explanatory relation.
The Diagnostic Outcome
Semiotics generalised demonstrates how resilient representationalism is.
Even when mental content is displaced and reference is deferred, the demand that meaning be something interpretable sustains the representational frame.
Teleology and causation, once again, are not added by hand. They follow from the need to explain how interpretation occurs and what it aims to achieve.
Preparing the Next Turn
The next developments attempt to escape this spiral by foregrounding use, interaction, and embodiment. Meaning is relocated once more, this time into activity itself.
Yet without an explicit ontological break, these approaches repeatedly slide back into representation, treating practices as vehicles for meaning rather than as sites of actualisation.
To see why, we must look at what happens after representation is supposedly left behind.
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