They can't do this, for reasons you should be able to figure out
once you ask the question.
What they do provide is a toolkit or sorts, and what we must
provide is the hard work of applying these tools in new and
creative ways to the issues at hand.
Some such theories are constructed at higher levels of abstraction
than other, or at least have less obvious connections between their
highest abstract levels and the ways they are applied. So Peirce,
for instance is very clear at the most abstract level, but a bit
mysterious how exactly you get from there to his amazingly
insightful and more particularistic analyses. Saussurean semiotics
(say via Hjelmslev, Barthes, Eco, Greimas) traces the pathways
up and down a little more concretely, but its toolkit is less
comprehensive in some ways than Peirce's. Finally, what I think
of as social-functional semiotics (Malinowski, Firth, Halliday,
Bateson, Prague, Foucault, Bakhtin, etc. -- includes say)
Silverstein, me, Latour, ...) the most mileage
out of methods for looking at what I think of as 'text-like'
(rather than 'sign-like') units of/for analysis, e.g. texts,
discourses, social formations, ideologies, cultural practices,
etc. Semiotics is more a method than a theory. One uses it to
make theories. And that is not easy. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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