Todd Oakley and I have written a manuscript with this title and abstract, and would much appreciate your feedback! Welcome to the zoom room or H402 at 15:00 sharp, as we will spend the first 30 minutes (or so) commemorating our friend and colleague Göran Sonesson who passed away on March 17, sharing memories of him.

Few other social technologies and institutions are more consequential to human societies than money. Yet money remains a deeply perplexing phenomenon: both a pan-human system of valuation and deeply conventional and variable in its uses; not instantiating a fully-fledged sign system, but with many signifying capacities. In this respect, it offers a conspicuous test case for cognitive semiotics in general, and for the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) of meaning in particular. Using MSM, with roots in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, we analyze two origin accounts of money: the commodity money account evidenced in archaic and classical Greek coinage, and the credit money account exemplified by early findings in Mesopotamia. Both accounts focus on the interactions between the pre-signitive Embodied, the cultural Sedimented, and the interactional Situated levels of meaning postulated in MSM, and propose different series of “loops”, based on semiotic processes operating according to motivated, and hence non-arbitrary, conventions developing within institutional formations that ultimately influence present day concepts of money.