One of Peirce's clearest and most complete definitions of a sign is one that he gives, not incidentally, in the context of defining "logic", and so it is informative to view it in that setting.
In fact, the correspondence between the two studies exhibits so many congruences and parallels that it is often best to treat them as integral parts of one and the same subject.
In other words, inquiry, "thinking" in its best sense, "is a term denoting the various ways in which things acquire significance" (John Dewey).
Thus, there is an active and intricate form of cooperation that needs to be appreciated and maintained between these converging modes of investigation.
Because the examples to follow have been artificially constructed to be as simple as possible, their detailed elaboration can run the risk of trivializing the whole theory of sign relations.
Despite their simplicity, however, these examples have subtleties of their own, and their careful treatment will serve to illustrate many important issues in the general theory of signs.
In their discussion, Ann and Bob are not only the passive objects of nominative and accusative references but also the active interpreters of the language that they use.
In the forthcoming examples, S and I are identical as sets, so the same elements manifest themselves in two different roles of the sign relations in question.
Thus, the rows of each Table list the ordered triples of the form (o, s, i) that make up the corresponding sign relations, LA and LB ⊆ O × S × I.
These Tables codify a rudimentary level of interpretive practice for the agents A and B, and provide a basis for formalizing the initial semantics that is appropriate to their common syntactic domain.
In the process of discussing these alternatives, it is useful to introduce a few terms that are occasionally used in the philosophy of language to point out the needed distinctions.
Other aspects of meaning have not received their fair share of attention, and thus remain anonymous on the contemporary scene of sign studies.
In the full theory of sign relations, this aspect of meaning includes the links that a sign has to affects, concepts, ideas, impressions, intentions, and the whole realm of an agent's mental states and allied activities, broadly encompassing intellectual associations, emotional impressions, motivational impulses, and real conduct.
Taken at the full, in the natural setting of semiotic phenomena, this complex system of references is unlikely ever to find itself mapped in much detail, much less completely formalized, but the tangible warp of its accumulated mass is commonly alluded to as the connotative import of language.
If an interpretant is considered to be a sign in its own right, then its independent reference to an object can be taken as belonging to another moment of denotation, but this neglects the mediational character of the whole transaction in which this occurs.