Billions Dead: The Fuzzy Killers Among Us

America's most effective killers, skilled chasers of lasers.               Source:CNN

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Pierce published several works discussing the nature, relation, and utilization of signs. To clarify, he writes:

      

        I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object,         

        and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the   

        later is thereby mediately determined by the former. [citation]

The key component to the definition is the inclusion of an interpretant. Similar to certain ideas that would later be put forth by British philosopher Paul Grice, this emphasis on interpretation strays away from the various "two-level" theories of meaning (connecting simply a sign to an object with no consideration of intention or interpretation) that were prevalent at the time.

However, Pierce went further to describe the different types of relationships that exist between signs and the objects they're associated with in the real world. He categorized these relationships into three man types: indexical signs, iconic signs, and symbolic signs. 

Pierce explains that indexical signs, or indices, refer to situations where the sign and the object existed together or were physically connected to some extent. In that respect, he acknowledges that photography (barring the creative powers of Adobe Photoshop), for the most part, belongs to this class, as:

          [the] resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such 

        circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. 

          [citation]

Moreover, indices can be understood as reflecting a relationship that consists as a matter of facts. Hence, this photo of a kitten presented in today's online edition of The New York Times is an example of an indexical sign. That is, regardless of any color correction or filters that may have been applied to edit the photograph, it holds that that cat, in particular, was present in front of the camera, and it was, in fact, that specific cat that is documented in the image. The photo does not inherently represent additional cats, as it is merely a sign that corresponds to exactly one kitten in the real world, however, given the context and the article it was coupled with, the photo may have been chosen to represent the notion of "cute cats" in general (placed strategically in a warm meadow of wildflowers, obviously).

image source

                                                                                                                     

Similarly, a popular image like Hello Kitty may be understood as an iconic sign. That is, the cat (or sign of a cat) imitates the likeness of an actual feline, but does not denote a particular animal in the real world. In other words, the sign resembles the object, but they are not physically or tangibly related--the sign is merely a representation, or an icon.

Meow.