After dedicating its two most recent editions (2022 and 2024) to the crucial issues of ecological transition and the problematics of life, the French Association for Semiotics proposes, for its next congress, to broaden these questions by examining the notions of determination and indetermination. These two categories—both conceptual and operational—run through all practices of meaning-making. From phrasal grammar (the determiner) to philosophical and ideological positions (determinism), they allow us to think the relationship between what is predictable and what emerges unpredictably, between the calculable and the evental, between the regularity of forms and the surprise of meaning.

Since its origins, semiotics has set itself the task of understanding the structures and logics of meaning production. Structural semiotics built its theoretical apparatus around a principle of organization primarily modeled by the narrative schema, which gives form to the continuity of symbolic becoming. This model was long conceived as a framework of predictability, since it accounts for the sequences, regularities, and anticipations of meaning within discourses and forms of life. Yet narrativity must also be conceived beyond this paradigm of regularity—as a synthesis of heterogeneity, as a semiotic operation that accommodates the discontinuous, the emergent, and the fluctuating. From this perspective, reflection on indetermination acquires decisive significance.

Charles Sanders Peirce, for his part, conceives indetermination not as mere imprecision or absence of form, but as the very condition of meaning. From the articulation of the categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness to the concept of “musement,” the Peircean sign, by linking an object to an interpretant, opens a field of possibilities in which meaning is never closed but always in the making. Indetermination is what allows the sign to remain alive—that is, to preserve a share of potentiality within the very act of its determination. Within this logic of continuity and vagueness, meaning is never exhausted in a single interpretation; it extends, reconfigures, and unfolds over time.

This problematic also finds an echo in biosemiotics, which investigates how the processes of life articulate biological determination and evolutionary indetermination.

Moreover, Yuri Lotman’s semiotics of culture has shown that indetermination is not only an opening toward an unpredictable future but also a reconfiguration of the past and a re-elaboration often at the source of conflict. Lotman also emphasized that cultural texts sometimes program indetermination themselves; by constantly rewriting the boundaries of meaning, they make it the engine of collective dynamism.

Similarly, political semiotics invites us to conceive crises, ruptures, and transformations as manifestations of social indetermination—not as anomalies but as vital expressions of symbolic transformation.

From a hermeneutic perspective, Paul Ricoeur underlined that every interpretation involves a tension between determination and indetermination: the text, like narrative, produces meaning not by eliminating uncertainty but by configuring it. This capacity to give form to the possible connects semiotics to an anthropology of language, where indetermination becomes a mode of inhabiting the world—an essential component of our individual and social forms of life.

Determination and indetermination also summon the question of enunciation, now central to contemporary semiotics. In any given situation, the very act of speaking—of producing linguistic acts whose perlocutionary effects exceed the speaker’s control—engages an element of unpredictability and emergence: every enunciation is an event, a becoming of meaning within a scene where nothing is entirely foreseeable. From a linguistic point of view, enunciation may be understood as a process of progressive determination: meaning does not pre-exist the act of speech; it is constructed within it through successive adjustments, reorientations, and reformulations. Language thus manifests a constant tension between formal stability and interpretative openness. The determination of meaning is never complete, as it renews itself with every actualization, at the intersection of systemic constraints and the potentialities of enunciative conditions. Enunciation thus appears as a locus where the relations between determination and indetermination are constantly reenacted, articulating the constraints of semiotic structures and the creative freedom of the speaking subject.

Contemporary dynamics bring this dialectic to the forefront. On one side, societies increasingly experience the unpredictable through deepening geopolitical crises, technological mutations, and environmental upheavals. On the other, new regimes of determination—carried by digital systems and artificial intelligence—claim to master contingency, anticipate behaviors, and model decisions. Between these two horizons—that of calculation and that of the event—semiotics is called upon to rethink its own position by addressing the following question: how can we analyze the forms of meaning in a world where unpredictability has become structural?

The congress seeks to explore these transformations through a dialogue among semiotic, philosophical, linguistic, biological, and social approaches. The aim is to understand how determination and indetermination interact within discourses, narratives, and meaning-making practices. The goal is to conceive indetermination not only as the absence of prediction but also as a semiotic act—as a power of opening meaning. The interdisciplinary vocation of the congress will be fully affirmed: contributions in linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, rhetoric, aesthetics, biosemiotics, computer science, and information and communication studies will be warmly welcomed.