> “Starkly stated, percepts are signs” ([[I Think I Am A Verb (1986)|Sebeok]], 4) Every sign points to another sign. If, after [[Charles Sanders Peirce|Peirce]], you [[for Peirce, a sign has three parts|breakdown a sign into three parts]] (sign, object, and interpretant)[^Peirce_vs_Saussure] you realize that that the concept of an interpretant means that your thoughts are themselves signs. [^Peirce_vs_Saussure]: As opposed to [[Ferdinand de Saussure]]'s binary between signifer and signified. Here is [[Thomas Sebeok]]'s explanation: > “An elementary example will do: consider some interpretants of the nominal vocable dog. These could be (partial) synonyms, like *canine*, *hound*, *bowwow*, or the like, or an extended dictionary definition, such as the OED's, beginning: 'A quadruped of the genus *Canis* . . . '" They could be (roughly) equivalent foreign nouns, like *chien*, *Hund*, *kutya*, etc. They might be folkloristic or literary representations (of which I listed many in Sebeok 1981b, Chapter 7), including entire novels, as Jack London's *The Call of the Wild* or Olaf Stapledon's *Sirius*, or scientific treatises, such as Michael W. Fox's book, *The Dog*. These are just a few obvious instances of monolingual or multilingual verbal interpretants. The singing and drumming dog drawn by an Aztec artist in the Madrid Codex, the Pompeian artisan's *cave canem* monitory illustration, and Charles Schulz's Snoopy are each a nonverbal interpretant for *dog*, as is also any movie about Rin Tin Tin, Fellow, Lassie, or Benji. And, of course, any "actual" dog I choose to point to becomes, by virtue of that gesture, its interpretant as well” ([[I Think I Am A Verb (1986)|I Think]], p. 5)