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Habits Die Hard: The Semiotics of Wolf Management in Finland

Juha Hiedanpää
Finland has struggled to formulate and implement policies for the national grey wolf (Canis lupus) population. Institutional adjustments were undertaken to improve wolf protection and human–wolf coexistence, but the wolf population has decreased. This calls for an explanation. I will apply Charles S. Peirce’s concept of habits and his semiotic theory to understand why it so difficult to design and implement a workable wolf policy. I intertwine Peircean methodology with the ontology provided by ecological economics and the analytic epistemic tools by old (traditional) institutional economics. Institutions exist to serve human purposes, and the modification of institutional infrastructure affects how social-ecological functions can still bring absent features of policy and management into existence. I therefore explicate the semiotic interplay of policy signs, objects, and interpretants in wolf management adjustments and consequent outcomes. Finally, the difficulty of habit formation for coexistence will be discussed and policy advice given.

Peircean Perspectives on the Global Climate Change Controversy

Victor R. Baker
The global climate change controversy is arguably the most important problem currently facing humankind. It involves seemingly insurmountable, conflicting issues of economics, science, politics, and philosophy. This essay suggests that, on the pathway to modernity, a kind of “wrong turn” was taken in these disciplines, involving problematic presumptions about phenomenology, logic, and metaphysics. A possible correction for current disfunctions, notably in the relation of economics to the physical sciences and political action, may found in the semiotic and pragmatist perspectives of the scientist/logician/philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).

Zombie Semiotics and the Economics of the Apocalypse

John Hartley
This paper explores the relations between economics and semiotics, using as its main conceptual lever the figure of the zombie. John Quiggin, Paul Krugman and others criticise the persistence of ‘undead ideas’ in economics. The paper applies this perspective to urban semiosis, where undead monuments have become key sites for staged conflict across the world. Working from Doru Pop’s critique of ‘zombie semiotics’, the paper turns from fiction to the realities of the digital semiosphere and technosphere. Using Juri Lotman’s model, it shows how the climate and coronavirus crises are globally mediated but not self-regulated. It identifies reflexive autocommunication as the means for semiospheric response to planetary crises. Zombie economics and conflict media spread fear of automation and ‘useless’ populations, while techno-entrepreneurs plan to abandon the planet to the apocalypse. It is left to autocommunication among teenage activists to contest the real zombies.

A Critical Realist Theory of Money and Finance: Social Cognitive Semiotics as Metatheory

Todd Oakley
A nagging question for cognitive semiotics is, “What is the relationship between social structure and agency?” Answers to that question are as elusive as they are essential for explaining the social cognitive facets of meaningful interactions. Elusive in the sense that the social sciences have traditionally lacked ontological rigor in the investigation of social structures and their relationship to individuals. Indeed, the very idea of a social structure is a hotly contested ground. Critical in the sense that many participants within the cognitive semiotics programme aim to explain meaning-making as an emergent property of coordinated activities within normative institutions and organizations. This article aims to provide some measure of ontological rigor to social cognitive semiotics from a critical realist perspective as it applies to the semiotics of money and finance.

La sémiotique de l’économie politique : une sémiotique du pouvoir

Bernard Lamizet
Since economy incites interpretations, it belongs to semiotics. Economy is one of semiotic forms of reasoning in politics. This paper deals with semiotics, the logic of politics, and the link between politics and psychology. The domain of politics is founded on the encounter between identities of actors expressed in exchange, in money, in trade, and in metalinguistic terms. The semiotics of economy is a political form of semiotics since money is an expression of power. The institution of money and of swap exchange are expressions of semiotization of the economy because money may be compared to language. The institution of money by power can be compared to the institution of language by political power. Economy also belongs to politics because there is in it an expression of utopia and of imagination. Hence, it is possible to apply to economy the three instances elaborated by psychanalyst J. Lacan : the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic.

For What It’s Worth: Power of Symbols and Symbols of Power

Florian Coulmas
This short essay discusses a particular relationship between language and money. On the face of it (at face value?) the two are rather different; however, closer inspection shows them to have a number of similar properties, such as relying on mutual trust and being subject to a political regime. Accordingly, they also serve similar functions, which are explored here. The economy of language provides a framework for studying similarities and differences of these means of exchange. Particular attention is given to the power of language and the power of money.