An analysis of worship according to Peirce's three part taxonomy of sign-types perhaps gains for us some idea of the kinds of meaning generated in liturgical signs. It does not yet say how such meanings are generated, nor whose meanings they are. This is the task addressed in this concluding chapter on the semiosis of worship. Its thesis is that meaning is forged (fastened together) in signs, and that this is a collaborative task for which both the sign's producers and its recipients are equally responsible.

In addition to attempting thus to give some concluding account of the making of liturgical meaning, I hope to draw into relationship with Peirce's semiotic theories of meaning some of the strands of thought rehearsed in earlier chapters: meaning as both making and finding, meaning as ‘Best Account’, the reasonableness of the meanings of worship, and so on. In all this I am ruled by a degree of circumspection. It was something of a vogue in the 1980s to attempt to find the points of convergence between the Peircean and Saussurean approaches to semiotic theory. That undertaking now appears singularly unpropitious. On the other hand, as I have noted already in various places, many careful scholars of Peirce consider him to have been a forerunner of what we now call postmodernity or late modernity.