Prof. Todd Oakley, one of the leading researchers in cognitive semiotics, is visiting our group from Case Western Reserve University, during May and June. At this last Cognitive Semiotics Seminar (aka CogSeminar) for the semester, he will present his latest research on the semiotics of money (which he will also be presenting at a plenary lecture at IACS-6 in Rome in early June). All are welcome, and if you wish to join the (early) dinner at Valvet after the seminar, please send an email to Jordan by May 25.

With few exceptions, humans are monetized beings. Money permeates our lives and livelihoods, forming an integral part of the lifeworld. Yet, money remains such an enigmatic semiotic phenomenon. The presentation attempts to offer some clarity on money as a semiotic system.

This presentation has four brief parts. I begin by offering an ontology of money as a social relation with five functions. In part II, money as a semiotic system, I offer a restrictive definition of a sign as entailing double differentiation with pre-signitive and signitive dimensions of numeracy, depiction, and language. In Part III, I outline and assess the two dominant theories of money—commodity money and credit money. In Part IV, I outline a specific taxonomy of distributed cognitive systems: those which are task dependent and those which are functionally integrated and argue that sovereign money systems are semiotic systems harboring properties of both, and that the meaning of money as a distributed phenomenon hinges on whether the grounding of semiosis commences from the user’s perspective or from the issuer’s perspective. It is a matter of some urgency that semioticians provide a descriptively adequate account of the money-sign.