Economics and Semiotics

Introduction

Economics and Semiotics: Charting a relationship

Constantinos Repapis and Stratos Myrogiannis

Part I: Semiotic views and the economy

1. The economy of reading: art as cultural investment

Stratos Myrogiannis

2. The semiotics of taste: Economies of pleasure and consumption in Brillat-Savarin, Balzac, Barthes and Roidis

Foteini Lika

3. Economics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis as meaning-making: the case for an interpretive science of economics.

Louise Braddock

4. The aura of the original and serial reproduction: The cases of painting, photography and the digital

Maria Giulia Dondero

 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)

Claudia de Lozanne Jefferies

6. The role of language in Keynes’ General Theory and Sraffa’s Production of Commodities

Nuno Ornelas Martins

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

Nicholas J. Theocarakis

 8. Narratives, sophists, irrationalism and confusion

George N. Politis

 Part III: Interpretation and meaning in economic theory

 9. The sign in the current of history: a semiotics history of comparative advantage

Constantinos Repapis

10. Is God a mathematical economist? Mathematical economics, scientific experience and Macro General Equilibrium Models from the Perspective of the Semiotic Peirce Conjecture

James R. Wible

11. The semiotic basis of financial valuation: A detour through the history of financial ideas

Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos

12. Hermeneutics of Interdependence

Roberto Scazzieri

Index

Biography

Stratos Myrogiannis is Adjunct Lecturer, School of Humanities, Hellenic Open University.

Constantinos Repapis is Lecturer in Political Economy, Department of Economics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is also a Visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow, Goldsmiths, University of London.

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.