CONCEPT
Unlimited Semiosis
Peirce's term for the endless chain of interpretation in which every interpretant is itself a sign that produces further interpretants, without terminus.
Unlimited semiosis is the process-character of meaning in Peirce's semeiotic. Every sign produces an interpretant. Every interpretant is itself a sign, which has its own object and produces its own further interpretant. The chain extends indefinitely — there is no final interpretant that terminates the process, only the asymptotic ideal toward which a community of inquirers converges in the long run. Meaning is therefore not a static correspondence between a word and a thing but a dynamic process — a cascade of interpretations, each shaped by its specific circumstances, each feeding into the next. The concept provides Peirce's answer to the question of how signs mean: not by pointing directly at objects but by generating chains of interpretation that stand in regular relations to objects.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept distinguishes Peirce's semiotic from theories that would ground meaning in a single moment of reference — the ostensive definition, the mental image, the brain state. Peirce's theory is irreducibly temporal: meaning unfolds in time as interpretation generates