 The third illustration comes from Peirce’s general theory of signs, or semiotics, which was developed entirely independently of the more well-known semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure, and is one of the most original areas of his thought. Peirce’s semiotics offers an account of the contents of thoughts as well as language, visual media, music and any other item that can be said to have meaning (for introductions to this area of Peirce’s thought, see Liszka 1996; Short 2007). Unlike Saussure, Peirce insisted that the sign-relation was essentially triadic in structure, comprising a representation, an object and an interpretation. In other words: a sign is ‘about’ some object because it is understood, in subsequent thought, as a sign of that object. This subsequent thought Peirce calls the sign’s interpretant. In understanding or interpreting a sign, we may feel things about it (which at times Peirce called the emotional interpretant), undertake actions that are rational in the light of the sign and the other information we possess (the dynamic interpretant), or an indefinite number of inferences may be drawn from it (the logical interpretant) (Jappy 2016). Interpretation is generally a goal-directed activity and, once again, the content of a sign is determined by the ways in which we use it (or might do so).