Granada, España
“Value”, Karl Marx claimed in his Critique of Political Economy, “converts every product into a social hieroglyphic”. This proposi tion by one of the most influential political economists of the last couple of centuries stresses the socio-semiotic dimension of some thing as volatile and immaterial as value, which elsewhere he de scribes as a “mysterious” thing “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”. Other than metaphysics, the ology, and moral philosophy (Marxist or otherwise) the former statement also invites an examination of value through the lens of pragmatics, the discipline that studies how to do things with words.1