Dear Anne,

I certainly agree, to put your point in other language, that meaning is 
a separate issue from behavior, and that meaning is neglected in much 
modern economics (that is in Samuelsonian economics).  "Revealed 
preference," for example, is about behavior viewed as you say from the 
outside, and embodies (if I may offer an analysis of its eticity) the 
imposition of a behaviorist scientific rhetoric c. 1935.

What I wonder---and I suspect you would join me in wondering---is why we 
care whether animals trade, or "trade."   Suppose they did, and trade 
was not unique to humans.  As your distinction shows, we could never know 
what it feels like to be an ant or elephant "trader."  But we know (this 
is the Polanyi point) from the inside, as humans, what it feels like to 
trade with a beloved human friend as against ordering something from 
humans on amazon.com.  We know that the meaning of the supposedly 
identical acts is different, and we have ideas, some of them scientific, 
about how the difference might matter.

So unless we are willing to confine economic or social analysis to that 
behaviorist rhetoric c. 1935 I mentioned, that a behavior is or is not 
"the same" lacks pragmatic consequences.  "Same" it may be etically, but 
quite different emically.

A separate point tending to the same conclusion---namely, that there's 
not much to be gained pragmatically from knowing whether trade is unique 
to humans---is that the measuring rod along which we decide whether 
bonobos or elephants are acting "the same" as humans is itself a human, 
and etic, choice.  In my vocabulary, it is a choice of metaphors and 
stories to use.  We can't help making such choices, of course.  Index 
number problems are index number problems, and there's no View From 
Nowhere to be occupied.  But as you say, it's good to be aware we are 
making the choice, instead of thinking that there's a measuring rod out 
there assigned by Nature.  That's why I remain unimpressed by the 
just-so stories of evolutionary psychologists along these lines.  What's 
"the same": spreading seed to serve the Selfish Gene, on the one hand, 
and rape now, on the other?  Or are they pragmatically quite different, 
as I would rather say.

Regards,

Deirdre McCloskey