Understanding relation in the reality of its suprasubjective character independently of awareness is the conditio sine qua non for achieving an understanding of semiosis. The present article takes us from Augustine’s original fourth-century proposal of signum as a general notion transcending the boundaries of nature and culture, through the thirteenth-century realization in Roger Bacon’s generation that concepts (both perceptual and intellectual) are signs formally, to John Poinsot’s demonstration of the irreducibly triadic character of sign relations. The suprasubjective relational essence of sign as based on the singularity of relation as being indifferent to realization in awareness is precisely what explains how one and the same sign-relation can pass from awareness-independent to awareness-dependent being, and conversely, due solely to the circumstances of its terminus. This understanding of semiosis is opposed to the Ockhamist denial of relation taken up by the mainstream moderns, as also to the misleading modern synonymy of ‘object’ and ‘thing’. Charles Peirce’s introduction of the notion of interpretant as not necessarily mental further opens the way to understanding how semiosis extends to the whole of nature. Contrary to the Saussurean notion that anthroposemiosis is the whole story of sign action, realizing that the Interpretant as third term in semiosis need not be a cognitive term opens the way to understanding how semiosis occurs in both plants (‘phytosemiosis’) and physical nature (‘physiosemiosis’), as well as among all animals (generically ‘zoösemiosis’) and human animals (species-specifically ‘anthroposemiosis’). Nevertheless, we will see that only in anthroposemiosis is there an awareness of relations in their difference from relata, underpinning Thomas Sebeok’s crucial distinction between ‘language’ and ‘linguistic communication’, and Jacques Maritain’s observation that while all animals use signs only human animals can come to know that there are signs by virtue of the capacity to objectify relations in their uninstantiability to sense.