Quotes from “Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication Process”

By Steven Horwitz (1992)

• A market characteristic of a good, such as saleability or scarcity in comparison to wants, is not a piece of objective information in Menger’s theory. Rather, such knowledge can only be discovered and constituted through the actual process of economic exchange.#
  Economics
• Not only is saleability itself not inherent in goods, knowledge of such saleability is not given to those who trade such goods. Saleability is ultimately determined by the mental processes of market actors, and the discovery of degrees of saleability is a process of drawing out and interpreting accessible traces of the contextual knowledge of those other minds, rather than uncovering some objective (outside the human mind) piece of information.#
  Economics
• We can either observe the behavior of others, judge its success and choose to imitate it, or we can enter a verbal or textual conversation with others and rely on the persuasive powers of their articulate thoughts to provide us with knowledge. Mises argues that imitation is, in general, a more plausible way to communicate the benefits of social institutions than is articulate persuasion.#
  Institutions
• Language and money do not reveal some pre-existing mental constructs or preferences [respectively], rather they constitute the way in which we express those constructs and preferences. Just as we cannot help but think in terms of the words that language provides us, we cannot help but act in the market in terms of the money prices of what we want to exchange.#
  Epistemology
• Communication in language is not a veil for reality; it is reality.#
  EpistemologyLanguage
• [R]ules and traditions pre-form the ways in which we act and understand in the world. . . . [T]his is not a disadvantage of rules and traditions, because there is nothing to compare them to by which they fall short. To the contrary, this is the great power of rules and traditions; it is they that make all other reason and knowledge possible.#
  Epistemology
• The “accuracy” of a specific price then is not a matter of corresponding to qualities in a good – or the non-monetarily expressed wants of humans – but simply a matter of finding itself in an orderly relationship with the complex of other prices that constitute a market.#
  Economics

Sally Frankel, Two Philosophies of Money (1978)

• When we trust a person, we are going beyond the mere assessment of probabilities. Indeed, trust or mistrust takes its place precisely because such an assessment cannot easily be made, or because it is too costly or time-consuming to do so. It enters where more exact knowledge is not available . . . Individuals and societies are dependent on countless symbols, myths, beliefs, and institutions which function as indicators of trustworthiness or the opposite. That is why trust has been described as a means of reducing complexity and a form of social communication . . . [it] spans the problems of time and uncertainty.#

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

• Just as my thoughts must take the form of a universally understood language so that I can attain my practical ends in this roundabout way, so must my activities and possessions take the form of money value in order to serve my more remote purposes.#
  LanguageMoney

Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844)

• The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between that which exists merely within me as imagination and the imagined as it exists as a real object outside of me.#

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (1966)

• Language is by no means simply an instrument, a tool. For it is in the nature of the tool that we master its use, which is to say we take it in hand and lay it aside when it has done its service. That is not the same as when we take the words of a language . . . such an analogy is false because we never find ourselves as consciousness over and against the world and, as it wore [sic], grasp after a tool of understanding in a wordless condition . . . we are always encompassed by the language that is our own.#
  Epistemology

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1975)

• Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world, but on it depends the fact that man has a world at all.#
  EpistemologyLanguage