After Representation: Preface

Where Representationalism Enters Linguistics and Semiotics: A Diagnostic Excavation

This series is not written as a corrective history. It does not aim to replace existing accounts, adjudicate intellectual winners, or recover an allegedly lost purity of thought. Its purpose is diagnostic.

The concern here is not who was right, but where certain explanatory habits entered, hardened, and began to feel inevitable. In particular, the series traces how representationalism comes to organise what counts as an explanation of meaning, often without being named or argued for.

Representationalism is treated neither as an error nor as a doctrine. It is approached as an orientation: a way of carving up phenomena such that meanings are taken to stand for something else, and explanation is therefore compelled to appeal to causes, origins, intentions, or ends. Once this orientation is in place, teleology and causation follow as symptoms, not as optional theoretical additions.

The historical movement traced here is therefore selective and structural rather than comprehensive. Moments are chosen not for their prominence, but for the specific commitments they install. Alternatives are noted not to valorise them, but to show that other paths were available — and that the dominance of representation was contingent, not necessary.

This is an excavation rather than a refutation. Its aim is to make visible the ground on which contemporary theories still stand, so that departures from representational explanation can be recognised as ontological shifts rather than local revisions.

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Series Aim

This series traces how representationalist assumptions come to organise linguistic and semiotic thought, not as an explicit doctrine, but as a background orientation that shapes what counts as explanation. The task is diagnostic rather than revisionist: to locate where and how representation becomes structural, and what alternative paths were available but largely foreclosed.

The argument proceeds historically, but not as intellectual history for its own sake. Each stop identifies a specific commitment—about signs, meaning, mind, or reference—that installs representational explanation and thereby invites teleology and causation.