8 - Money

Summary

The cognitive basis of money

In the world of number, money is a complete contrast to time. Where time is part of the experience of every man, money is something man creates, although just how and why remains a problem. A population can live without money, if necessary by resorting to alternative means for dealing with the problems money solves. In the cognitive domain money provides the supreme model for elementary arithmetic, with its fundamental concern for operations involving cardinal numbers. There is hardly any problem about the measurement of quantity. Money measures not only itself, but almost anything else which can be quantified. Money, in its broadest definition, is ‘the means for comparing – in quantitative terms – two unlike things on a scale which is common to both of them. The reason for making such a comparison depends upon its institutional context, in which there must be, in any case, a recognised common “standard of value”’ (Crump 1981: 10), applicable to different categories of things. This abstract concept has no natural basis. The different categories brought under one and the same ‘umbrella’ are a matter determined by cultural factors, provided one recognises that the cognitive domain defined by this concept, in any particular case, may bridge any number of separate cultures that are otherwise quite unrelated.