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