As humans interpret representations of information, the general behaviors and phenomena produced are recognized as abstract non-observable forms called signs. Signs are forms of representation that refer to existing sets of information. The sign can be described and categorized several different ways. I use the system created by American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce to describe the sign, because it illustrates the differences among forms of information, and shows how these forms are interrelated. The sign is a set of information, created by a person's conscious mind, that represents something else. For instance, the information coded in a fashion picture is a sign of fashionable dress because it refers to fashionable goods in the real world. Pierce defined the sign as:

"... something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, it creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign."(Pierce 99)

A person can perceive and interpret information that is represented in a fashion picture or its caption as a particular form of the sign: an icon, index, or symbol. Pierce says:

"An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead pencil streak as representing a geometrical line. (Pierce 104)

The information coded in the fashion picture itself is iconic. The pattern of colored ink on paper is formed when the visual features of fashionable goods are recognized by the eyes and mind of the photographer, who uses his camera to capture and copy that information onto paper. The fashion picture communicates information directly because in one instant, a person visually experiences the scene that is represented on the magazine page. An index designates an associative relationship between at least two discrete sets of information in a person's brain. It exists when one set of information signifies another by pointing to or corresponding with the set of information it is associated with. An index always refers to individual elements, sets, or collections of information, and does not necessarily resemble the element or set of information it is related to. An index must have a connection to its object. For example, an image created from a picture of a woman wearing a black pantsuit and black wings functions as an index of an actual woman wearing a black pantsuit and black wings. The link between the image and the actual fashionable goods it refers to is the physical correlation between the patterns of information coded in ink on paper and the visual features of the fashionable goods in the real world those patterns mimic. A symbol is a sign that has an arbitrary connection to the set of information it represents, and is established by convention. All words, books, and other conventional signs are symbols. (Pierce 112) Of the there categories of signs, symbols are the least closely linked to objects in the real world, because symbols are abstractions of information drawn from the real world or from the imagination. go back