Prof. Todd Oakely and I will give this (postponed form earlier this term) talk on some joint work in progress. All are welcome to the zoom link (with cameras on) or in the physical room from 3pm for catching up. The talk will start as usual at 15:15.

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.