Salience Component of Price

Canonical definition

Because a Salience signal is emitted by, or borrowed by, almost any Object present in a Thinker-parsed social field, the Mimetic Premium component of a price is generically non-zero: a price rarely sits at its A-I baseline (PA + PI). Even an Object whose primary function is pure A-deficit correction (a staple such as milk, which the body needs and must identify in the environment) carries, in addition to its deficit-correcting value, a Salience signal separate from that deficit signal, the brand, the packaging, the provenance, the visible fact that others select it, and that Salience is valued by purchasers as a Mimetic Premium. The decomposition Ptotal = PA + PI + PM therefore has PM greater than zero as its generic case, not a special one; the pure-baseline price (PM = 0) is the rare limit, approached only where an Object emits and borrows no Salience at all, which a social species almost never achieves. This is the price-side counterpart of Object Parasitism: Object Parasitism holds that there are no pure-M Objects (M rides on an A-I substrate); the Salience Component of Price holds that there are almost no pure-baseline prices (an A-I substrate almost always carries an M overlay).