Ferdinand de Saussure on the Affinities Between Economics and Semiotics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper reconstructs, from the manuscripts of the Course in General Linguistics, Saussure’s reflections on the affinities and differences between linguistics and economics, particularly his model of commodities as signs and elements of the economic system, analogous to the verbal sign as a basic unit of the language system. Key notions of this comparison are signifies vs. signifieds arbitrariness, syntagmatic and paradigmatic association, positive vs. negative value, type and token, substance and form. The paper studies how H. Lefebvre, J. Baudrillard, Rossi-Landi, and the cultural anthropologists M. Sahlins, M. Douglas, and B, Isherwood apply elements of this model in analyses of goods and commodities. The paper argues that Saussure proposes a weak analogy, that one of its weaknesses is the comparison at the level of the word instead of the one of a proposition or an argument. It concludes with the affirmation that Saussure’s analogies have a great heuristic value for cultural semiotics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".