Short description:

Everything in our world can be interpreted as a sign. This opens up the question: How do we proceed from semantics to pragmatics, from theory to practice and vice versa? What is the nature of the relation between interpretation, action and reality? And, what can we learn by viewing economics and the economy through this lens?

Long description:

Everything in our world can be interpreted as a sign. This opens up the question: How do we proceed from semantics to pragmatics, from theory to practice and vice versa? What is the nature of the relation between interpretation, action and reality? And, what can we learn by viewing economics and the economy through this lens?

This volume gathers together a broad range of scholars in order to address issues relating to the intersection of economics and semiotic theory. Using concepts from the fields of economics and semiotics, the contributors to this volume revisit past and present theories and reinterpret models of thought and expression to show that our preconceptions about the economy can be fruitfully challenged and gain depth through a semiotic lens. The application of the semiotics approach to economics discourse is vital in helping us to examine topics that range from theory and economic history to the development of key economic ideas and concepts. The volume aims to enhance our understanding of how economic agents act, and our conceptualisation of the economy and its cultural products can be reimagined.

This volume will be of great interest to economists, literary scholars and students in the humanities.

The meanings of concepts and their interpretation lie at the heart both of economic theorising and of economic structures and behaviour, where everything can be regarded as a sign. Interest in language and meaning therefore has a long history in economics. This important edited volume provides a modern analysis of the interrelations between economics and semiotic theory by bringing together ideas from experts in history, literary theory, philosophy and psychology, as well as economics and semiotics. The result is a fascinating collection of papers which provides an excellent basis for future research on understanding economics through semiotics - and vice versa.

- Professor Sheila Dow, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Stirling.

Table of Contents:

Introduction Economics and Semiotics: Charting a relationship Part I: Semiotic views and the economy 1. The economy of reading: art as cultural investment 2. The semiotics of taste: Economies of pleasure and consumption in Brillat-Savarin, Balzac, Barthes and Roidis 3. Economics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis as meaning-making: the case for an interpretive science of economics. 4. The aura of the original and serial reproduction: The cases of painting, photography and the digital Part II: Narratives and the role of language in economic discourse 5. Delving into the effectiveness and limits of economic rhetoric in 17th-century Spain: On the use and misuse of tropes in monetary treatises (1600-1642) 6. The role of language in Keynes? General Theory and Sraffa?s Production of Commodities 7. ?The received value of names imposed for signification of things was changed into arbitrary?. Troikaspeak in the age of memoranda. The case of Greece 8. Narratives, sophists, irrationalism and confusion Part III: Interpretation and meaning in economic theory 9. The sign in the current of history: a semiotics history of comparative advantage 10. Is God a mathematical economist? Mathematical economics, scientific experience and Macro General Equilibrium Models from the Perspective of the Semiotic Peirce Conjecture 11. The semiotic basis of financial valuation: A detour through the history of financial ideas 12. Hermeneutics of Interdependence Index