In reading Chapter 3 in Pullman’s text, I spent a good deal of time reflecting on signs and how we succumb to cognitive biases so frequently when being exposed to heavily persuasive texts such as advertisements. Advertisements tell us far too often who we should be and who we are, which is all defined in large part to what product we buy and choose to spend our money on. Axe body spray advertisements got me long ago in my prepubescent years. But amidst the reveries of spraying on half a can of Axe body spray after leaving gym class, I always find myself laughing at the absurdity the commercials have to me now. I was once persuaded that by spraying Axe body spray, I could walk out of a locker room after romping around in a gym vigorously for 50 minutes and women would still find me attractive. Moreover, they’d swoon helplessly at my manly stench. This selling of a sign is so similar to the example Pullman uses in the text. This is equivalent to the example of where there’s smoke there’s fire being a fallible sign. Where there’s Axe body spray sprayed, there will be a woman pulled to him. These advertisements appeal to our inner desires and manipulates it until you spend all of your money on Axe body spray and still end up single.
A probable sign I thought about was a probable sign. in the book it lists:
Big house —–> Big Family
Corporate jet —> Rich Person
Smiling face —–> Pleasant person
*Military Veteran ———–> Patriot
The final probable sign mark by the asterisk is my own creation. Pullman defines a probable sign as “a fallible sign where the connection between two events or things is nevertheless strong enough that we will fell somewhat secure in inferring one from the other.” I thought about what signs am I projecting to other people when I meet them or disclose information about myself? How do they perceive them? Do my thoughts and opinions articulated verbally surprise or confuse them? Although I am proud of my service, I do not consider myself a patriot. Simply because there are things that I am not willing to sacrifice for an institution or ideal that would not do the same for me. Yet, expects me to yield to the same respect to which I was never shown. Patriotism, to me is closely associated with pride. You take pride in your nation and will gladly boast about how magnificent it is. But people are being gunned down in the street violently due to domestic terrorism, poor people are getting poor and their at the expense of the rich getting richer. It’s getting more and more challenging by the year to complete a higher education track. People are suffering, while a few are living well. I cannot be proud of that. There are signs all about for us to read and break down our understanding of our perception of them.
walrustalk 
Never have I thought how big and impactful advertisements are till I started getting older. I see that things that interest me aren’t advertised as much or maybe they are but I guess they don’t do a good enough job to catch me. When it comes to probable signs, I easily say I’m a smiling person isn’t always a pleasant one, what if you are at a job that requires you to smile. Technically your not pleasant, well you can be, but what if your going through something at the time that isn’t making you a pleasant person.
I think the magic and sadness of advertising is how it makes us feel–empowered that a product will do some wildly amazing thing for us that we could not achieve on our own. The sadness is that we often believe it enough times to sink a small mint on a myriad of products that only make the manufacturers richer. Nevertheless, without engaging advertising, how many products would we buy apart from the very basic or overly flashy. We all need toilet tissue and we all want to zoom down a winding highway with the top down on a nifty Mercedes convertible. For all products that fall in between, those both helpful and not, probably need the aid of advertising gurus to entice us to buy. In the end, we hopefully can read beyond the hype and refer to the truism: “If it is too good to be true then it is.”