The Marxian concept of value is a cultural and hence a semiotic concept, rather than economic. Based on a scrutiny of Marx’s writings, this article proposes that Marx’s analysis of the commodity can and should also be interpreted as a semiotic treatise. This insight may also be relevant to contemporary Marxian investigations concerning labour and value in capitalism insofar as the notion of value of commodities is concerned. Whereas the literature on the crisis of value theories has focused primarily on the relationship between use value and exchange-value (and abstract labour), the present paper focuses on the aspect of the sign value of commodities in Marx’s theory and on how the notion of value represents of human labour.
A nagging question for cognitive semiotics is, “What is the relationship between social structure and agency?” Answers to that question are as elusive as they are essential for explaining the social cognitive facets of meaningful interactions. Elusive in the sense that the social sciences have traditionally lacked ontological rigor in the investigation of social structures and their relationship to individuals. Indeed, the very idea of a social structure is a hotly contested ground. Critical in the sense that many participants within the cognitive semiotics programme aim to explain meaning-making as an emergent property of coordinated activities within normative institutions and organizations. This article aims to provide some measure of ontological rigor to social cognitive semiotics from a critical realist perspective as it applies to the semiotics of money and finance.
C. S. Peirce had a keen interest in the most mathematical economics of his era. We know that Peirce read and wrote about the mathematical economics of Cournot and Jevons and at least mentions the names of Ricardo, Marshall, and Walras. Peirce also provided a mathematical, optimizing model of the insurance firm as his most elaborate example of pragmatism in the Harvard Lectures of 1903. What is significant is that Peirce chose economic examples to illustrate what is really a semiotic and mathematical conception of pragmatism. Diagrams and semiotics play a central role in Peirce’s philosophy of mathematics. Just a few years ago, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath authored a long treatise on evolutionary economics with Peirce’s semiotics as a central aspect of that work. Additionally, Herrmann-Pillath makes significant use of diagrams and equations from various scientific disciplines. Diagrams are a central feature of Herrmann-Pillath’s treatise giving it something of a Peircean, qualitative mathematical character. These similarities and differences between Peirce and Herrmann-Pillath on semiotics, economics, mathematics, and evolutionary processes are quite novel and thus of intrinsic interest.
The paper reconstructs, from the manuscripts of the Course in General Linguistics, Saussure’s reflections on the affinities and differences between linguistics and economics, particularly his model of commodities as signs and elements of the economic system, analogous to the verbal sign as a basic unit of the language system. Key notions of this comparison are signifies vs. signifieds arbitrariness, syntagmatic and paradigmatic association, positive vs. negative value, type and token, substance and form. The paper studies how H. Lefebvre, J. Baudrillard, Rossi-Landi, and the cultural anthropologists M. Sahlins, M. Douglas, and B, Isherwood apply elements of this model in analyses of goods and commodities. The paper argues that Saussure proposes a weak analogy, that one of its weaknesses is the comparison at the level of the word instead of the one of a proposition or an argument. It concludes with the affirmation that Saussure’s analogies have a great heuristic value for cultural semiotics.
