“It’s the economy, stupid!”This famous epilogue might well be adapted to de-scribing the current enthusiasm about neuroscientific approaches to studying complex cognitive processes, such as consciousness, memory, reasoning and de-cision-making:“It’s the brain…”
However, does the brain convey our epilogue? We have yet to ascertain how the brain generates the mind, how neurophysiological structures and the func-tions they perform give rise to ideas, to representafunc-tions about reality, which while not being the same as those realities, nonetheless remain real. This repre-sents a true million-dollar-question.
The brain is individual, and so is the mind. Nevertheless, our minds do not only generate ideas; they are engaged in communication, in sharing these ideas
(“calculation”, x“therefore”Y, in his own words), which produces a different outcome from that which one might expect as the result of that initial happiness. It is further relevant to note how important the anticipated evaluative perspective of the Other influences this decision process, throughout (“They’ll find me”,“Ishould”). Emotions certainly play a role in decisions, but so does thinking and intersubjectivity.
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with equally equipped minds. This communication encapsulates a potential for exchange materialized in signs deployed for sharing what otherwise would re-main as the individual’s own mental life and thereby influencing and changing the mental life of others. Our minds have evolved to cooperate with other minds in this way, thus creating collective environments more amenable to an other-wise quite hopeless species; in other words, culture. Attuning to other minds proves of significant importance and hence we become deeply connected to them from our earliest days.⁶In this sense, human thought is shared by nature and is not the result of any individual mind thinking alone. Evolutionary psy-chologist Michael Tomasello puts forward a poignant example to illustrate this idea:
If we imagine the forbidden experiment in which a human child grows up on a desert is-land, miraculously supplied with nutritional and emotional sustenance but in the total ab-sence of contact with other human beings, this child would not invent a language or a com-plex technology or a comcom-plex social institution. […] The reason that no single child or group of children could on their own in their own lifetimes create any version of a modern human culture and its material and symbolic artifacts is that human cultures are historical products built up over many generations (Tomasello 1999: 512).
A lonely human on a desert island might still hold the potential to learn a lan-guage, apply a numerical system or come up with a money system. An individual brain would allow for this potential, but these symbolic creations are only gen-erated and sustained in social contexts. They all imply exchangeability, and this implies the Other.
Therefore, human thinking reaches beyond the individual brain. It consists of representations of things, situations, processes in the world (both external and experienced). The relationship between representation and the referent is based on some principle of authority⁷ validating the correspondence. In the case of money, this authority is institutional in terms of ascertaining its value.
However, the belief connecting the material anchor to the potential for value pre-cedes this regulation. In the sense that it is not asserted, this may be viewed as tacit. This belief is shared, transcends the individual mind, and is epistemically relevant not by force of conventional agreement but by the recurrent continuity
This shows at very basic behavioral levels: newborns mirror their caregivers’facial expres-sions from the very beginning; strangers automatically replicate the menacing or the friendly ex-pression of other strangers; infants attend intensely to the human voice or movement, while they boringly ignore similar stimuli from other sources once their initial curiosity is satisfied.
This idea is proposed and thoroughly elaborated in Per Aage Brandt’s“semio-cognitive ontol-ogy”(in print).
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of its practice resulting from a history of exchange. In this sense, money works like language with its usage regulated by institutional norms (government fiat vs.
normative grammars orSprachgesellschaften); but its representation, its semiotic potential (money stands for value; words stand for meanings) becomes a shared and assumed truth. The lonely child on Tomasello’s island would not come up with either money or language on its own, because not only would the need to exchange value or meaning not arise (exchange being an inherently two-way path), but he would also lack the community of minds needed for such ab-stract concepts to arise in the first place.
However, where, if not in the brain, is this belief located? And how can it thus be shared? These are further million-dollar-questions. Beliefs are not mate-rial but they can matemate-rialize in processes or behaviors. Just like ideas, they can be shared and simultaneously thrive in different minds. These beliefs are in themselves not located in the mind and far less so in any individual mind.
Money is not in the brain in that sense. However, they do exist as our economic transactions and our communicative exchanges daily reveal. Their recurrent up-dating in the practice of exchanges over time endows them with the epistemic force of being true: words have meaning (right or wrong), money has value (pos-itive or negative). That this is the case is not merely the result of any tacit agree-ment between two parties, but also stems from the acknowledging observation of a third party, which recognizes the structured fulfillment of that value potential in the exchange. This observation, multiplied in practice and extended through time (and, as Tomasello claims, any single generation would not prove time enough to create the cumulative cultural environment for which humans develop genetic adaptations), materializes in the shared belief that words are exchange-able as representations for what they themselves are not; and that money is ex-changeable whether for either immediate or potential objects. This belief repre-sents a grounding condition for the exchanges edited by cultures (e.g. in different languages, texts; in different currencies, transactions), for which other cultures find equivalences.
Hence, when dealing with money, we begin with the belief that money has value. However before we set out to invest, speculate, give or buy, how do we con-ceptualize money? Another million-dollar-question. In order to account for why and how we conceive money, i.e. in order to understand how we make sense of money as a human conceptual and cultural creation, and moreover what we mentally per-form when making money-related decisions, we need to situate money and econom-ics within the network of concepts of human experience. The experience of dealing with money is a cultural experience, and therefore, by making cognitive insights into money, we are necessarily peeking into the brain/mind as much as we are peek-ing into culture. Moreover, as part of the economic system, money is a higher order Cognitive Science and How We Think about Money 189
concept (such as justice, for instance) and, in order to be grasped, needs to be cor-related with the more basic domains of human experience as conceptualized and represented by the human mind.
We understand the world and ourselves in mutual interaction in terms of a network of related semantic domains, schematically structured and finite. In cog-nitive science, there have already been several attempts at describing this net-work, for instance, the theory of frame semantics by Charles Fillmore (1982) and the theory of basic and abstract semantic domains by Ronald Langacker (1987). One further account is that proposed by Per Aage Brandt (2004), who claims that we construe and make sense of our experience as naturally cultural beings in terms of a structured architecture of domains integrated at different levels of complexity. On a primary experiential level, we conceptualize experi-ence in terms of a physical domain (of causal forces, objects and space, move-ment), a social domain (an intentional world of collective action, in which we participate), a mental world (a theater of the mind where imagined contents are performed and the interaction between ourselves and our external percep-tions is enacted, of the memories and emopercep-tions involved in them), and a per-formative speech act domain (structured by dynamic schemas of intersubjective volition, permission and prohibition).
These basic semantic domains are integrated according to the principle of
“maximally abstract notional meanings at minimal combinatory costs”(Brandt 2004: 52), instigating a second generation of anthropologically relevant do-mains: the domain of work, a social space where physical objects are manipulat-ed and transformmanipulat-ed and social identities are establishmanipulat-ed; the domain of love, the integration of the social with the domain of the acts of speech, a private, domes-tic space where interaction and attunement are established with persons in col-lective constellations (from circles of friends to groups of colleagues and, more centrally, love, kinship and relative relations); and finally the domain of wor-ship, in which causal phenomena interact with speech acts, so that physical cau-sality becomes in a sense manipulable through performance.
From this second layer of domains – of practical actions – an integrated layer arises, based on the intersubjective exchanges established in the areas where the practical domains pair up. One of these is the domain of economic ex-change: the objects produced in the domain of work (modeled in turn by the physical and the social domain) are acquired and stored in the domestic domain and eventually returned to the social domain, generating a market. The exchange of signs between the domestic and the worship domains generates the domain of beauty and aesthetics: the subjects offer goods to the sacred instance in ex-change for magic signs, such as magic gestures and words, even names. Finally, the integration of the domains of work and worship gives rise to the domain of 190 Ana Margarida Abrantes
acts and their jurisdiction. These acts are compared and categorized by the bina-ry opposition of right and wrong, and they entail a speech act value, such as ob-ligations and prohibitions, while others, such as criminalization and punishment conform to a normative code, namely law, which inherits its deontic potential from the domain of worship.
These levels of exchange–markets, art, courts–constitute the foundations of the cultural life of a society, the socio-functional structures ensuring collective existence in a community. The domain of economy is thus one of the domains situated at the level of exchanges along with the level of jurisdiction and the do-main of art. One notion proves common to these three dodo-mains, namely the no-tion of value, and the polysemy of this term may well represent an indicator of the same level at which these domains are situated: exchangeability value in the case of economics, moral values as regulators in jurisdiction and the order of life in a social community, and the aesthetic values, implied in the significance we assign to a work of art, which differs from the way we subjectively express our liking or disliking of it (for example, explaining how we can be elated by a sense of pleasure– not joy–when listening to a deeply sad piece of music– a difference drawing on Kant’s distinction between beauty and the sublime).
In all these three levels of exchange, money circulates as a measure of value (economic, moral or aesthetic); this goes without saying for the economics do-main. In the domain of jurisdiction, money may serve as a regulator of infrac-tion, necessary to re-establishing the moral balance: fines and other monetary penalties work in this way. They are different from economic exchanges both given their deontic imprint and their reverse temporal sequence: you have to pay (back) for what you did wrong (as opposed to paying ahead for something you wish to acquire). The difference is linguistically marked in a significant way: even while the core syntactic structure remains the same (to pay X to Z for Y), both prepositions and modal verbs account for a significant difference:
penance is not prophylactic; it is always remediatory.
In the case of aesthetics (and beyond the act of placing a price tag on a work of art, which would actually return us to the domain of economics), money as-sumes a dative profile, and is in this case either materially transformed into a gift (actual or potential, like a gift card), or mentally transformed, thus reconcep-tualized as a donation, an endowment, patronage, or philanthropy. The linguis-tic modulation in this case indicates the diverse aesthelinguis-tic potential. Even if, in the end, these forms of exchange are economic (as they prompt a return– a thank you note, an act of public recognition), they are firstly considered in aes-thetic terms. This differentiates them from functional, pragmatic transactions as they stand out from the“taking”-based norms of economic exchange.
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