The signifier/signified distinction has survived longer than most metaphysical relics not because it is correct, but because it appears indispensable. Even those who reject reference, representation, or mental images often retain this divide as a minimal semiotic architecture: something like a form on one side, something like a meaning on the other.
This final distinction now fails for the same reason the others did.
It presupposes what it claims to explain.
What the divide was meant to solve
Historically, the signifier/signified distinction attempted to resolve a genuine problem: how meaning could be systematic without being reducible to things in the world.
The solution was elegant on its face:
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the signifier: a material or formal element (sound, mark, gesture),
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the signified: a concept or meaning associated with it.
Meaning could now be:
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non-referential,
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socially structured,
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independent of external objects.
But elegance is not the same as ontological adequacy.
The distinction works only if the signified is already meaningful prior to its participation in any construal. And that assumption has already been removed.
Why the signified cannot do the work assigned to it
Ask the decisive question:
What is the signified, ontologically?
It cannot be:
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a thing in the world (that reintroduces reference),
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a mental object (that collapses into psychologism),
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a stored meaning (that collapses into symbolic containment).
If the signified is defined instead as a relation, a function, or a value, then it is no longer a distinct pole at all—it is simply a redescribed construal.
The signified survives only by being ontologically vague.
The hidden asymmetry
The divide presents itself as symmetrical: two sides, jointly constitutive.
In practice, it is not.
This asymmetry reveals the truth of the matter:
The divide is not foundational. It is retrospective.
Meaning does not sit between form and content
The signifier/signified model assumes that meaning occupies an intermediate space: not in the world, not in the symbol, but between them.
Meaning is not a bridge between two domains. It is the local coherence of a construal under constraint. Once this is seen, the need for a mediating entity disappears.
Why the divide keeps reappearing
The persistence of the signifier/signified distinction is not theoretical—it is psychological and institutional.
It reassures us that:
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meaning is stable,
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interpretation has an anchor,
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communication transfers something intact.
In other words, it preserves the myth of semantic security.
But as this series has shown repeatedly, stability is an achievement, not a guarantee. The divide does not explain stability; it redescribes its effects.
A relational replacement (without new dualisms)
Removing the signifier/signified divide does not leave us with chaos. It leaves us with a cleaner account:
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Forms participate in construal.
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Construals actualise meaning.
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Meaning is a first-order phenomenon.
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Stability is a pattern across events, not a stored entity.
No poles. No hidden containers. No metaphysical intermediaries.
Just relational events under constraint.
Closing the series
This series has not argued for a new theory of signs.
It has articulated an ontology of meaning.
Meaning is not reference.
It is not representation.
It is not contained in objects, symbols, or conceptual poles.
Meaning is the first-order actualisation of constraint within a system of potential.
With the signifier/signified divide now removed, nothing essential has been lost.
What has been lost are explanatory fictions.
What remains is a relational ontology in which meaning is not something that stands for the world, but something that happens in it.
The Ontology of Meaning ends here.
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