ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the trick behind money. The philosopher John Searle uses money as an example of how social reality is constructed. He writes as follows: As a preliminary formulation we can say, for example, in order that the concept money applies to the stuff in my pocket, it has to be the sort of thing that people think is money. It is not only economists who propose this. If everybody stops believing it is money, it ceases to function as money, and eventually ceases to be money. In one sense, of course, this is uncontroversial; if all the shops stopped accepting money tomorrow then money would no longer serve its function. To employ Adam Smith's terminology, money has all its value in exchange and none of it in use. As Searle often remarks in the book quoted above, it is structurally similar to just about the only viable theory of how words have their meanings.
